Words of Warmth: Trust and Sociability Norms for over 26k English Words
This provides a resource for social psychology and computational linguistics researchers to study stereotypes and biases, though it is incremental as it extends existing warmth dimensions to a word-level dataset.
The authors tackled the problem of quantifying warmth, trust, and sociability associations for English words by creating a large-scale repository of over 26,000 manually derived word associations, showing high reliability and enabling studies on child language acquisition and bias research.
Social psychologists have shown that Warmth (W) and Competence (C) are the primary dimensions along which we assess other people and groups. These dimensions impact various aspects of our lives from social competence and emotion regulation to success in the work place and how we view the world. More recent work has started to explore how these dimensions develop, why they have developed, and what they constitute. Of particular note, is the finding that warmth has two distinct components: Trust (T) and Sociability (S). In this work, we introduce Words of Warmth, the first large-scale repository of manually derived word--warmth (as well as word--trust and word--sociability) associations for over 26k English words. We show that the associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicons to study the rate at which children acquire WCTS words with age. Finally, we show that the lexicon enables a wide variety of bias and stereotype research through case studies on various target entities. Words of Warmth is freely available at: http://saifmohammad.com/warmth.html