From Trial by Fire To Sleep Like a Baby: A Lexicon of Anxiety Associations for 20k English Multiword Expressions

TL;DR

This paper presents the first large-scale lexicon of over 20,000 English multiword expressions (MWEs) associated with anxiety, enabling diverse research across psychology, NLP, and public health.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive lexicon of anxiety-related MWEs, demonstrating its reliability and analyzing their prevalence and compositionality.

Findings

Anxiety associations in MWEs are highly reliable.

Prevalence of anxiety- and calmness-related MWEs varies across sequence lengths.

The lexicon reveals insights into the compositionality of anxiety associations.

Abstract

Anxiety is the unease about a possible future negative outcome. In recent years, there has been growing interest in understanding how anxiety relates to our health, well-being, body, mind, and behaviour. This includes work on lexical resources for word-anxiety association. However, there is very little anxiety-related work on larger units of text such as multiword expressions (MWE). Here, we introduce the first large-scale lexicon capturing descriptive norms of anxiety associations for more than 20k English MWEs. We show that the anxiety associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicon to study prevalence of different types of anxiety- and calmness-associated MWEs; and how that varies across two-, three-, and four-word sequences. We also study the extent to which the anxiety association of MWEs is compositional (due to its constituent words). The lexicon enables a wide variety of anxiety-related research in psychology, NLP, public health, and social sciences. The lexicon is freely available: https://saifmohammad.com/worrylex.html