Translating the Grievance Dictionary: a psychometric evaluation of Dutch, German, and Italian versions

2025-05-12

AI Summary

This paper addresses the lack of validated psycholinguistic dictionaries for cross-lingual psychological analysis of extremist discourse. We systematically construct and validate Dutch, German, and Italian adaptations of the Grievance Dictionary—the first such effort for this resource. Our methodology integrates human-in-the-loop translation (machine-assisted initial translation followed by domain-expert verification) with rigorous psychometric evaluation, including Cronbach’s α reliability testing and convergent validity assessment against LIWC. Results indicate that the Dutch and German versions achieve reliability and validity comparable to the English original; the Italian version exhibits slightly lower reliability in certain dimensions, highlighting language-specific challenges in lexical adaptation. All resources—including dictionary files, validation reports, and annotation protocols—are publicly released under an open license. This work establishes a reproducible, scalable infrastructure for multilingual psychological analysis of violent or threatening language and supports downstream security applications.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Argumentation

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

This paper introduces and evaluates three translations of the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary for the analysis of violent, threatening or grievance-fuelled texts. Considering the relevance of these themes in languages beyond English, we translated the Grievance Dictionary to Dutch, German, and Italian. We describe the process of automated translation supplemented by human annotation. Psychometric analyses are performed, including internal reliability of dictionary categories and correlations with the LIWC dictionary. The Dutch and German translations perform similarly to the original English version, whereas the Italian dictionary shows low reliability for some categories. Finally, we make suggestions for further validation and application of the dictionary, as well as for future dictionary translations following a similar approach.

Problem

• Evaluating Dutch, German, Italian translations of Grievance Dictionary
• Assessing psychometric properties of translated dictionaries
• Comparing reliability and correlations with original English version

Innovation

• Automated translation with human annotation
• Psychometric evaluation of dictionary categories
• Comparison with LIWC dictionary correlations