Imagisaurus: An interactive visualizer of valence and emotion in the Roget's thesaurus

Abstract

The form of a thesaurus often restricts its use to word look ups and finding related words. We present Imagisaurus, an online interactive visualizer for the Roget's Thesaurus, which not only provides a way for word lookups but also helps users quickly grasp the nature and size of the thesaurus taxonomy. Imagisaurus connects thesaurus entries with a large valence and emotion association lexicon. Easy-to-use sliders give the user fine control over depicting only those categories with the desired strength of association with positive or negative sentiment, as well as eight basic emotions. A second interactive visualization is used to explore the emotion lexicon. Both the Roget's Thesaurus and the emotion lexicon have tens of thousands of entries. Our visualizers help users better understand these lexical resources in terms of their make up as a whole.