Lexichrome: Text Construction and Lexical Discovery with Word-Color Associations Using Interactive Visualization

Date

2020-07-03

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

ACM

Abstract

Based on word-color associations from a comprehensive, crowdsourced lexicon, we present Lexichrome: a web application that explores the popular perception of relationships between English words and eleven basic color terms using interactive visualization. Lexichrome provides three complementary visualizations: "Palette" presents the diversity of word-color associations across the color palette; "Words" reveals the color associations of individual words using a dictionary-like interface; "Roget's Thesaurus" uncovers color association patterns in different semantic categories found in the thesaurus. Finally, our text editor allows users to compose their own texts and examine the resultant chromatic fingerprints throughout the process. We studied the utility of Lexichrome in a two-part qualitative user study with nine participants from various writing-intensive professions. We find that the presence of word-color associations promotes awareness surrounding word choice, editorial decision, and audience reception, and introduce a variety of use cases, features, and opportunities applicable to creative writing, corporate communication, and journalism.

Description

Keywords

visualization, qualitative user study, word-color associations, text construction, lexical discovery, creative writing

Citation

Chris Kim, Uta Hinrichs, Saif M. Mohammad, and Christopher Collins. 2020. Lexichrome: Text Construction and Lexical Discovery with Word-Color Associations Using Interactive Visualization. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 477–488. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395503