An Osgoodian perspective on WordNet

According to Osgood´s “Semantic Differential” theory, the connotative meaning of most adjectives can be rated on a scale, the ends of which are antonymic adjectives. Such a pair of antonymic adjectives is called a factor. Osgood and his colleagues found that most of the variance in the text affecting judgment was explained by only three major factors: the evaluative factor (e.g., good-bad), the potency factor (e.g., strong-weak), and the activity factor (e.g., active-passive). The method described in this article defines an ontology-supported topological calculus over the senses of the words and takes into account all categories of content words (not only adjectives). Each set of synonyms is associated with a new mark-up which generalizes the usual subjectivity annotation (positive, negative, and objective) according to a user-based multi-criteria differential semantics model.