Colourful Language: Measuring Word-Colour Associations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a crowdsourced lexicon of word-colour associations, emphasizing abstract concepts and emotions, and analyzes how these associations manifest in language and can be automatically detected.

Contribution

It presents a novel large-scale resource for concept-colour associations, especially for abstract concepts, and evaluates automatic detection methods using linguistic cues.

Findings

Abstract concepts and emotions have strong colour associations.

Co-occurrence and polarity cues help detect colour associations.

The lexicon enables better understanding of language-colour relationships.

Abstract

Since many real-world concepts are associated with colour, for example danger with red, linguistic information is often complimented 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. We focus especially on abstract concepts and emotions to show that even though they cannot be physically visualized, they too tend to have strong colour associations. Finally, we show how word-colour associations manifest themselves in language, and quantify usefulness of co-occurrence and polarity cues in automatically detecting colour associations.