Therapy Language Analysis Using Automatically Generated Psycholinguistic Norms

Lexical norms, normative and usually numeric, ratings of word meaning are popular tools in research domains relating to human expression and perception of language, especially with regards to emotion. In this paper we are proposing an algorithm of psycholinguistic norm expansion capable of generating high quality norms representing aspects of language beyond emotion, including language concreteness and indicators of age and gender association. Starting from small manually annotated norm lexica, continuous norms for new words are estimated using semantic similarity and a simple linear model along eleven expression-related dimensions. The model is shown to achieve state of the art level performance of word norm estimation. To investigate the potential of these norms as analysis tools of more complex phenomena we use them to investigate the differences in therapist speech in sessions conducted by practitioners adhering to the psychoanalytic and client-centered schools of therapy.