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the record · 2006 · semantics of natural language

Saurus: an emotionally-weighted thesaurus

Jim Gouldstone, Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman & Hiroshi Ishii (2006). Proceedings of the AAAI-06 Workshop on Computational Aesthetics, 107–110, AAAI Press.

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Saurus asks why a thesaurus should treat synonyms as emotionally interchangeable. It augments roughly 35,000 Roget terms with pleasure, arousal, and dominance values. Starting from more than 1,000 rated ANEW words, it follows co-occurrences in Open Mind Common Sense to estimate values for about 70 percent of the thesaurus. A writer supplies text and a short guide phrase; after lemmatization, tagging, and attempted sense selection, Saurus chooses synonyms nearer that tone. Single-word examples can be apt, but full passages often become nonsensical when the wrong sense is chosen. The paper contains no formal accuracy study or user trial. Long passages average toward emotional neutrality, changed word lengths complicate comparison, and synonymy alone cannot guarantee local grammar, discourse fit, or intended meaning.

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