Machine Translation as an Alternative to Language-Specific Dictionaries for LIWC

Yuying Ye, P. Boot

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperScientificpeer-review

Abstract

This research presents an alternative approach for applying the text analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to non-English text: using machine translation (MT) to translate the text into English and then apply the English LIWC dictionary, rather than applying a translated LIWC dictionary to the original texts. We evaluate the alternative method using the output from two open-source MT systems and Google Translation on a set of TED Talk subtitle data. The method is tested on three language pairs: Dutch-English, German-English and Spanish-English. Provisionally, MT seems to lead to better results in the three language pairs than language-specific dictionaries.
Original languageEnglish
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • LIWC
  • machine translation
  • text analysis
  • tooling
  • digital humanities

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  • DHBenelux 2020

    P. Boot (Participant)

    03 Jun 202005 Jun 2020

    Activity: Participating in or organising an eventConferenceAcademic

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