The NRC Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD) Lexicon v1
www.saifmohammad.com/WebPages/lexicons.html
Contact: Saif M. Mohammad (saif.mohammad@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca)

The NRC Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD) Lexicon is a list of English words and their valence,
arousal, and dominance scores.  The lexicon with its fine-grained real-valued scores was created by
manual annotation using best--worst scaling.  For a given word and a dimension (V/A/D), the scores
range from 0 (lowest V/A/D) to 1 (highest V/A/D). 
v.scores: has valence scores
a.scores: has arousal scores
d.scores: has dominance scores

Details of the lexicon are in this paper.
Obtaining Reliable Human Ratings of Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for 20,000 English Words.
Saif M. Mohammad. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Melbourne, Australia, July 2018.

Words play a central role in language and thought. Factor analysis studies have shown that the
primary dimensions of meaning are valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD).  We obtain reliable human
ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for more than 20,000 English words. We use Best--Worst
Scaling to obtain fine-grained scores and address issues of annotation consistency that plague
traditional rating scale methods of annotation.  We show that the ratings obtained are vastly more
reliable than those in existing lexicons.  We also show that there exist statistically significant
differences in the shared understanding of valence, arousal, and dominance across demographic
variables such as age, gender, and personality. 



Terms of use:
- The lexicons mentioned in this page can be used freely for research purposes.
- If you use a lexicon, then please cite the associated papers.
- If interested in commercial use of any of these lexicons, send email to the contact. Use of the lexicons in commercial applications without express consent from NRC is strictly prohibited.
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- National Research Council Canada (NRC) disclaims any responsibility for the use of the lexicons listed here and does not provide technical support. However, the contact listed above will be happy to respond to queries and clarifications.
 
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- you give us feedback regarding these lexicons.
- you tell us how you have (or plan to) use the lexicons.
- you are interested in having us analyze your data for sentiment, emotion, and other affectual information.
- you are interested in a collaborative research project. We also regularly hire graduate students for research internships.