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

2026-02-20

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in affective language resources by constructing and publicly releasing the first large-scale anxiety-associated lexicon specifically targeting English multiword expressions (MWEs), which have been largely overlooked in favor of single-word items. The resource comprises over 20,000 MWEs annotated with descriptive anxiety ratings collected via crowdsourcing, and its reliability and compositionality are rigorously evaluated using linguistic methodologies. The resulting lexicon demonstrates high inter-annotator agreement and reveals systematic differences in the distribution of anxiety- and calmness-related semantics across MWEs of varying lengths. By providing a high-quality, fine-grained inventory of affective MWEs, this work fills a significant void in emotion-related lexical resources and offers foundational data for interdisciplinary research in psychology, natural language processing, and the social sciences.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

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

Problem

• anxiety
• multiword expressions
• lexicon
• emotion association
• natural language processing

Innovation

• multiword expressions
• anxiety lexicon
• compositional semantics
• emotion norms
• descriptive norms