Breaking Bad: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 10k English Multiword Expressions
This provides a resource for researchers in NLP, psychology, and related fields to study emotional aspects of language, but it is incremental as it extends an existing lexicon with new data.
The authors tackled the lack of emotional association ratings for multiword expressions by creating a new lexicon with human ratings for valence, arousal, and dominance for over 10,000 English multiword expressions and 25,000 words, showing high reliability and enabling analysis of emotional characteristics like strong emotionality and compositionality.
Factor analysis studies have shown that the primary dimensions of word meaning are Valence (V), Arousal (A), and Dominance (D). Existing lexicons such as the NRC VAD Lexicon, published in 2018, include VAD association ratings for words. Here, we present a complement to it, which has human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for 10k English Multiword Expressions (MWEs) and their constituent words. We also increase the coverage of unigrams, especially words that have become more common since 2018. In all, the new NRC VAD Lexicon v2 now has entries for 10k MWEs and 25k words, in addition to the entries in v1. We show that the associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicon to examine emotional characteristics of MWEs, including: 1. The degree to which MWEs (idioms, noun compounds, and verb particle constructions) exhibit strong emotionality; 2. The degree of emotional compositionality in MWEs. The lexicon enables a wide variety of research in NLP, Psychology, Public Health, Digital Humanities, and Social Sciences. The NRC VAD Lexicon v2 is freely available through the project webpage: http://saifmohammad.com/WebPages/nrc-vad.html