Theory-Grounded Computational Text Analysis

Verbal behavior and the future of social science.

“…These behaviors, in turn, influence food-related motivation and the perceived desirability of food items (de Castro, 2000). Standing in stark contrast, such well-defined psychobehavioral accounts of language are sparse in the NLP and computational social science literature (McCarthy & Dore, 2023). This is surprising, given the soaring popularity of NLP methods across the social sciences.…”

“…Our discussion of verbal behavior is intentionally focused through the lens of psychological research and its widely shared goals: that is, the scientific study of the individual mind, mental life, and the human condition. Other discussions about how language patterns can reveal meaningful insights into discourse itself-for example, conversation dynamics, social interaction (e.g., relational goals, speech acts, politeness), and outcomes of interpersonal processes-are discussed but represent worthwhile areas of inquiry that have received serious attention and scholarship in NLP (Benamara et al, 2018;Fried et al, 2023;McCarthy & Dore, 2023) and deserve a separate treatment in their own right. We hope that this article may serve as a springboard for scholars interested in such interdisciplinary pursuits to consider how the present arguments inform, advance, or challenge their thinking and conventions.…”