Essence of meaning

Below is a guest post by Robert Shackleton: Peter Dodds and coauthors have recently published research that proposes a significant shift in the essence-of-meaning framework, which traces its lineage back to Charles Osgood’s initial efforts to use dimension reduction to quantify human meaning. The paper, “Ousiometrics: The essence of meaning aligns with a power-danger-structure framework instead of valence-arousal-dominance,” appeared in Science Advances. The abstract: From work emerging through the middle of the 20th century, the essence of meaning has become widely accepted as being described by the three orthogonal dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. These essential dimensions have become the cornerstone of sentiment analysis across many fields. By reexamining first types and then tokens for the English language, and through the use of automatically annotated histograms—“ousiograms”—we find here that the essence of meaning conveyed by words is instead best described by a…