Colourful Language: Measuring Word–Colour Associations
Table 5: The number of senses of colour terms in WordNet.
['colour', 'white', 'black', 'red', 'green', 'yellow', 'blue', 'brown', 'pink', 'purple', 'orange', 'grey']
Colour terms are listed in WordNet, and interestingly, they are fairly ambiguous. A casual examination of WordNet reveals that some synsets (or concepts) are close to their associated colour’s synset. For example, darkness is a hypernym of black and inflammation is one hop away from red. It is plausible that if a concept is strongly associated with a certain colour, then such concept–colour pairs will be close to each other in a semantic network such as WordNet. If so, the semantic closeness of a word with each of the eleven basic colours in WordNet can be used to automatically determine the colour most associated with the 177 thesaurus categories from the gold standard described in Section 5 earlier. We determine closeness using two similarity measures—Jiang and Conrath \shortciteJiangC97 and Lin \shortciteLin97—and