[Colloquium] TODAY-Topics, Lexicons and Controversies in Daily Moral Dilemmas: What I Learned From /r/AITA

[Catherine Clemons via Colloquium]

UChicago/TTIC NLP Seminar Presents


Lexing Xie

Professor of Computer Science

Australian National University


Thursday, November 14

2:00pm - 3:00pm

In Person: John Crerar Library 298


Title: Topics, Lexicons and Controversies in Daily Moral Dilemmas: What I Learned From /r/AITA


Abstract: Moral dilemmas play an important role in theorizing both about ethical norms and moral psychology. Yet thought experiments borrowed from the philosophical literature often lack the nuances and complexity of real life. We use 100,000 threads from Reddit's r/AmItheAsshole to examine the features of everyday moral dilemmas. We discover 47 finer-grained, meaningful topics and group them into five meta-categories. We show that most dilemmas combine at least two topics, such as family and money. We also observe that the pattern of topic co-occurrence carries interesting information about the structure of everyday moral concerns. The incompleteness and fragility of their lexicons and from poor generalization across data domains. We fine-tune a transformer language model to measure moral foundations in text based on diverse data domains. The resulting model, called Mformer, outperforms existing approaches on the same domains and further generalizes well to four commonly used moral text datasets, improving by up to 17% in AUC. Our ongoing work is on understanding the malleability of daily moral judgements under the lens of group controversy and decision uncertainty. Our analysis demonstrates the utility of a fine-grained data-driven approach to online moral dilemmas, I will conclude with a few reflections on interdisciplinary collaborations.


Bio: Lexing Xie is a Professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU), where she leads the ANU Computational Media Lab and directs ANU Integrated AI Network. Her research interests are in machine learning and computational social science with a particular focus on online optimization, neural networks for sequences and networks, and applied problems such as distributed online markets, decision-making by humans and machines. Lexing received the 2023 ARC Future Fellowship and the 2018 Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research. Prior to joining ANU, she was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and a BS from Tsinghua University. Lab website https://cmlab.dev/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.google.com/url?q=https:**Acmlab.dev*&sa=D&source=calendar&ust=1731879717219140&usg=AOvVaw34WfYJPMm3qgkELReQB9JT__;Ly8v!!BpyFHLRN4TMTrA!-4bW55amlwPIqG5aXa40_ZUJnUmGRV8gqG-zQBVX9W0xD_BzId6JYv9Ilp0BDLRocFPKEYUNFmQFTRvPNtrKkGYQziiIXb1wDLFMBnLicA$>


[Picture of Lexing Xie]

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