Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A number of recent models of semantics combine linguistic information, derived from text corpora, and visual information, derived from image collections, demonstrating that the resulting multimodal models are better than either of their unimodal counterparts, in accounting for behavioural data. However, first, while linguistic models have been extensively tested for their fit to behavioural semantic ratings, this is not the case for visual models which are also far more limited in their coverage. More broadly, empirical work on semantic processing has shown that emotion also plays an important role especially for abstract concepts, however, models integrating emotion along with linguistic and visual information are lacking. Here, we first improve on visual representations by choosing a visual model that best fit semantic data and extending its coverage. Crucially then, we assess whether adding affective representations (obtained from a neural network model designed to predict emojis from co-occurring text) improves model’s ability to fit semantic similarity/relatedness judgements from a purely linguistic and linguistic-visual model. We find that adding both visual and affective representations improve performance, with visual representations providing an improvement especially for more concrete words and affective representations improving especially fit for more abstract words.