Even the Abstract have Colour: Consensus in Word-Colour Associations

Colour is a key component in the successful dissemination of information. Since many real-world concepts are associated with colour, for example danger with red, linguistic information is often complemented with the use of appropriate colours in information visualization and product marketing. Yet, there is no comprehensive resource that captures concept-colour associations. We present a method to create a large word-colour association lexicon by crowdsourcing. A word-choice question was used to obtain sense-level annotations and to ensure data quality. We focus especially on abstract concepts and emotions to show that even they tend to have strong colour associations. Thus, using the right colours can not only improve semantic coherence, but also inspire the desired emotional response.