Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(1):e29484. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029484. Epub 2012 Jan 11.
Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.
在过去的一百万年里，人类语言作为社会交流和符号表示的基本工具而出现和发展。人们在一定程度上使用语言来传达情感信息，从而产生了以下核心和偶然问题：(1)自然语言的情感范围是什么？(2)自然语言是中立的、积极的还是消极的？在这里，我们报告说，人们感知到的 10000 多个最常用英语单词的积极程度表现出明显的积极倾向。更深入地说，我们对四个大型且不同的语料库的单词积极程度分布进行了特征描述和量化，证明了它们的形式在很大程度上与单词使用频率无关。
