CLex: A Lexicon for Exploring Color, Concept and Emotion Associations in Language

Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 306–314, Avignon, France, April 23 - 27 2012. c⃝2012 Association for Computational Linguistics CLex: A Lexicon for Exploring Color, Concept and Emotion Associations in Language Svitlana Volkova Johns Hopkins University 3400 North Charles Baltimore, MD 21218, USA svitlana@jhu.edu William B. Dolan Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052, USA billdol@microsoft.com Theresa Wilson HLTCOE 810 Wyman Park Drive Baltimore, MD 21211, USA taw@jhu.edu Abstract Existing concept-color-emotion lexicons limit themselves to small sets of basic emo- tions and colors, which cannot capture the rich pallet of color terms that humans use in communication. In this paper we begin to address this problem by building a novel, color-emotion-concept association lexicon via crowdsourcing. This lexicon, which we call CLEX, has over 2,300 color terms, over 3,000 affect terms and almost 2,000 con- cepts. We investigate the relation between color and concept, and color and emotion, reinforcing results from previous studies, as well as discovering new associations. We also investigate cross-cultural differences in color-emotion associations between US and India-based annotators. 1 Introduction People typically use color terms to describe the visual characteristics of objects, and certain col- ors often have strong associations with particu- lar objects, e.g., blue - sky, white - snow. How- ever, people also take advantage of color terms to strengthen their messages and convey emotions in natural interactions (Jacobson and Bender, 1996; Hardin and Maffi, 1997). Colors are both indica- tive of and have an effect on our feelings and emo- tions. Some colors are associated with positive emotions, e.g., joy, trust and admiration and some with negative emotions, e.g., aggressiveness, fear, boredom and sadness (Ortony et al., 1988). Given the importance of color and visual de- scriptions in conveying emotion, obtaining a deeper understanding of the associations between colors, concepts and emotions may be helpful for many tasks in language understanding and gener- ation. A detailed set of color-concept-emotion as- sociations (e.g., brown - darkness - boredom; red - blood - anger) could be quite useful for sentiment analysis, for example, in helping to understand what emotion a newspaper article, a fairy tale, or a tweet is trying to evoke (Alm et al., 2005; Mo- hammad, 2011b; Kouloumpis et al., 2011). Color- concept-emotion associations may also be useful for textual entailment, and for machine translation as a source of paraphrasing. Color-concept-emotion associations also have the potential to enhance human-computer inter- actions in many real- and virtual-world domains, e.g., online shopping, and avatar construction in gaming environments. Such knowledge may al- low for clearer and hopefully more natural de- scriptions by users, for example searching for a sky-blue shirt rather than blue or light blue shirt. Our long term goal is to use color-emotion- concept associations to enrich dialog systems with information that will help them generate more appropriate responses to users’ different emotional states. This work introduces a new lexicon of color- concept-emotion associations, created through crowdsourcing. We call this lexicon CLEX1. It …

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