Words of Warmth: Trust and Sociability Norms for over 26k English Words

Saif M. Mohammad


Abstract
Social psychologists have shown that Warmth (W) and Competence (C) are the primary dimensions along which we assess other people and groups. These dimensions impact various aspects of our lives from social competence and emotion regulation to success in the work place and how we view the world. More recent work has started to explore how these dimensions develop, why they have developed, and what they constitute. Of particular note, is the finding that warmth has two distinct components: Trust (T) and Sociability (S). In this work, we introduce Words of Warmth, the first large-scale repository of manually derived word–warmth (as well as word–trust and word–sociability) associations for over 26k English words. We show that the associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicons to study the rate at which children acquire WCTS words with age. Finally, we show that the lexicon enables a wide variety of bias and stereotype research through case studies on various target entities. Words of Warmth is freely available at: http://saifmohammad.com/warmth.html
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.922
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18830–18850
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.922/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Saif M. Mohammad. 2025. Words of Warmth: Trust and Sociability Norms for over 26k English Words. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 18830–18850, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Words of Warmth: Trust and Sociability Norms for over 26k English Words (Mohammad, ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.922.pdf