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Thematic Analysis of Words that Invoke Values in the Net Neutrality Debate

This paper describes an initial analysis of the association of specific vocabulary choices with the invocation of human values in testimonies prepared for public hearings about Net neutrality in the United States. Motivation for this work comes from an interest in understanding what people value and how they express those values in writing. Related work includes research on human values from fields ranging from social psychology to advertising to humancomputer interaction. First, human annotators used closed coding to identify human values in testimonies based on a prior meta-analysis of human values. Next, a “values dictionary” was automatically learned that identifies words that are strongly associated with sentences that human annotators coded as being related to specific values. Finally, an open-ended thematic analysis was conducted. The contribution of the paper is to enhance our understanding of how human values are expressed, as well as to introduce and evaluate a new automated tool for facilitating social science research.