François Pétry Département de science politique Université Laval Grant received in 2014-2015

This research introduces a new dictionary for the automated analysis of the tone of French media. We named it the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSDFr) in reference to the English lexicon developed by Young and Soroka (2012), the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD), from which the LSDFr was built. We compare the LSDFr to the only other French sentiment lexicon, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). First, we detail the construction of the dictionary. We then test the internal validity of the LSDFr comparing it with a corpus of manually coded texts. Finally, we test the external validity of LSDFr by measuring how the media tone, calculated using our dictionary, predicts voting intentions in the last four Quebec elections. Our goal is to enable other researchers to conduct media analyses with a comparable corpus of texts in French.

Publications

• Duval, D. et F. Pétry. “L’analyse automatisée du ton médiatique: construction et utilisation de la version française du Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/ Revue canadienne de science politique 49 (2), 2016, 197-220.