Words with Attitude
J. Kamps, M. Marx

Abstract:
The traditional notion of word meaning used in natural language processing is literal or lexical meaning as used in dictionaries and lexicons.  This relatively objective notion of lexical meaning is different from more subjective notions of emotive or affective meaning.  Our aim is to come to grips with subjective aspects of meaning expressed in written texts, such as the attitudes or value expressed in them.  This paper explores how the structure of the WordNet lexical database might be used to assess affective or
<BR>emotive meaning.  In particular, we construct measures based on Osgood's semantic differential technique.