Breaking Bad: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 10k English Multiword Expressions

TL;DR

This paper introduces an expanded human-rated lexicon for over 10,000 multiword expressions and 25,000 words, capturing valence, arousal, and dominance, to facilitate research across NLP, psychology, and social sciences.

Contribution

It provides a new, reliable lexicon with ratings for MWEs and words, increasing coverage and enabling analysis of emotionality and compositionality in language.

Findings

High reliability of associations in the lexicon

MWEs exhibit varying degrees of emotionality

The lexicon supports diverse research applications

Abstract

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