Even the Abstract have Colour: Consensus in Word-Colour Associations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a crowdsourced lexicon of word-colour associations, emphasizing the strong colour ties of abstract concepts and emotions, to enhance information dissemination and emotional impact.

Contribution

It presents a novel large-scale, sense-level word-colour association lexicon created through crowdsourcing, focusing on abstract concepts and emotions.

Findings

Abstract concepts and emotions have strong colour associations.

Crowdsourcing effectively captures sense-level word-colour data.

Colour enhances semantic coherence and emotional response.

Abstract

Colour is a key component in the successful dissemination of information. Since many real-world concepts are associated with colour, for example danger with red, linguistic information is often complemented with the use of appropriate colours in information visualization and product marketing. Yet, there is no comprehensive resource that captures concept-colour associations. We present a method to create a large word-colour association lexicon by crowdsourcing. A word-choice question was used to obtain sense-level annotations and to ensure data quality. We focus especially on abstract concepts and emotions to show that even they tend to have strong colour associations. Thus, using the right colours can not only improve semantic coherence, but also inspire the desired emotional response.