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From Trial by Fire to Sleep like a Baby: A Lexicon of Anxiety Associations for 20K English Multi-Word Expressions

Summary

Existing anxiety resources cover individual words or whole sentences and posts. Multiword expressions (MWEs) such as "on edge" or "cool as a cucumber" have been largely left out, even though their emotional meaning often cannot be derived from their parts.

Saif M. Mohammad (National Research Council Canada) addresses this gap with WorryMWEs, a crowdsourced lexicon of anxiety–calmness association norms for more than 20k English MWEs. The ratings are descriptive: they capture how speakers perceive and use these expressions, not how they ought to.

The author reports that the annotations are highly reliable. He then uses the lexicon to measure how common different kinds of anxious and calm MWEs are among two-, three- and four-word sequences. He also tests how far an expression's anxiety association can be explained by its component words.

The paper argues that such data is useful in many fields: semantics, affective and cognitive science, computational social science, public health and emotion analysis. It can also serve as a human-validated reference for checking or guiding lexicons generated by LLMs. The lexicon is freely available.

Key points

  • Resource: WorryMWEs supplies anxiety association scores for upward of 20k MWEs in English. It is distributed together with the word-level WorryWords lexicon (about 44k words) as WorryLex v2 at saifmohammad.com/worrylex.html.
  • Novelty: It is presented as the first large-scale MWE–anxiety lexicon. Earlier affective MWE work includes the NRC VAD Lexicon v2 (valence, arousal and dominance for 10k MWEs), sentiment labels for 5000 English idioms (Jochim et al., 2018) and concreteness ratings for 62,000 MWEs (Muraki et al., 2023).
  • Scope of "MWE": The term is used loosely for any sequence of two or more words. Analyses are broken down by n-gram length (bigram, trigram, fourgram) and by MWE type.
  • Analyses: The paper measures how prevalent anxiety- and calmness-associated MWEs are, and how compositional anxiety is, by comparing each MWE's score with those of its constituent words.
  • Venue: LREC 2026, pages 8026–8039. The exact reliability scores and annotation details are in the paper's methods section, which was not included in the provided excerpt.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/4kx7maur4jao

@inproceedings{mohammad2026trial,
  title = {{From Trial by Fire to Sleep like a Baby: A Lexicon of Anxiety Associations for 20K English Multi-Word Expressions}},
  author = {Mohammad, Saif M.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4kx7maur4jao},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4kx7maur4jao}
}

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