Is LIWC reliable, efficient, and effective for the analysis of large online datasets in forensic and security contexts?
Madison Hunter, Tim Grant · Applied Corpus Linguistics · 2025
This article evaluates the reliability, efficiency, and effectiveness of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Boyd et al., 2022) for the analysis of a white nationalist forum. This is important because LIWC has been the computational tool of choice for scores of studies generally and many examining extremist content in a forensic or security context. Our purpose, therefore, is to understand whether LIWC can be depended upon for large-scale analyses; we initially examine this here using a small sample of posts from a set of just eight users and manually checking the program's automated codings of a subset of categories. Our results show that the LIWC coding cannot be relied upon – precision falls to as low as 49.6% and recall as low as 41.7% for some categories. It would be possible to engage in considerable manual correction of these results, but this undermines its purported efficiency for large datasets.