Performing Multilingual Analysis With Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015). An Equivalence Study of Four Languages

Today, there is a range of computer-aided techniques to convert text into data. However, they convey not only strengths but also vulnerabilities compared to traditional content analysis. One of the challenges that have gained increasing attention is performing automatic language analysis to make sound inferences in a multilingual assessment setting. The current study is the first to test the equivalence of multiple versions of one of the most appealing and widely used lexicon-based tools worldwide, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015). For this purpose, we employed supervised learning in a classification problem and computed Pearson's correlations and intraclass correlation coefficients on a large corpus of parallel texts in English, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian. Our findings suggested that LIWC2015 is a valuable tool for multilingual analysis, but within-language standardization is needed when the aim is to analyze texts sourced from different languages.