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The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding threatening language use
van der Vegt,Isabelle Mozes,Maximilian Kleinberg,Bennett Gill,Paul
van der Vegt,Isabelle
Mozes,Maximilian
Kleinberg,Bennett
Gill,Paul
Abstract
This paper introduces the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary that can be used to automatically understand language use in the context of grievance-fueled violence threat assessment. We describe the development of the dictionary, which was informed by suggestions from experienced threat assessment practitioners. These suggestions and subsequent human and computational word list generation resulted in a dictionary of 20,502 words annotated by 2318 participants. The dictionary was validated by applying it to texts written by violent and non-violent individuals, showing strong evidence for a difference between populations in several dictionary categories. Further classification tasks showed promising performance, but future improvements are still needed. Finally, we provide instructions and suggestions for the use of the Grievance Dictionary by security professionals and (violence) researchers.
Description
Funding Information: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 758834).
Date
2021
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Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
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Keywords
Grievances, LIWC, Language, MODELS, Psycholinguistic dictionary, RISK-ASSESSMENT, Threat assessment, Violence
Citation
van der Vegt, I, Mozes, M, Kleinberg, B & Gill, P 2021, 'The Grievance Dictionary : Understanding threatening language use', Behavior Research Methods, vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 2105-2119. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01536-2