Cynthia Wessell's Dictionary of Affect

Question

Is Cynthia Wessell's dictionary of affect available as an open dataset? Looks like a it's closed-source executable (and $175) on the official website.

Answer 1

Well, you picked a very commercial word list so even 'finding' a copy of the dataset could lead to legal problems or results you can't publish.

But, to get a taste, there is a web-app that I found after chasing down some broken links. It's apparently endorsed by Cynthia herself. Check it out here.

Now, interestingly, the creator of that site posts a link to more info.

And, in that more info section is a URL that may help you greatly:

dead link http://compling.org/cgi-bin/DAL_sentence_xml.cgi?sentence=This+is+a+great+web+app

replacement? https://sail.usc.edu/dal_app.php

So, there you have it, a web interface to the DAL without having the DAL itself. For a sentence in the URL with words separated by a '+' sign, you get in return XML:

<sentence>
 <word>
  <token>This</token>
   <emotion>
    <measure type="DAL" valence="1.7500" activation="1.3333" imagery="1.0"/>
   </emotion>
 </word>
 <word>
  <token>is</token>
   <emotion>
    <measure type="DAL" valence="1.8889" activation="1.1818" imagery="1.0"/>   
   </emotion>
 </word>
 <word>
  <token>a</token>
   <emotion>
    <measure type="DAL" valence="2.0000" activation="1.3846" imagery="1.0"/>
   </emotion>
 </word>
 <word>
  <token>great</token>
   <emotion><measure type="DAL" valence="2.6250" activation="2.1250" imagery="1.0"/>
   </emotion>
 </word>
 <word>
  <token>web</token>
   <emotion>
    <measure type="DAL" valence="1.7778" activation="1.8750" imagery="2.8"/>
   </emotion>
  </word>
  <word>
   <token>app</token>
    <emotion>
     <measure type="DAL" valence="" activation="" imagery=""/>
    </emotion>
   </word>
  </sentence>

Answer 2

A new source of the DAL seems to be online

PDF Readme:

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/papers/dict_of_affect/DictofAffectinLang.README.pdf

and the dictionary (txt format)

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/papers/dict_of_affect/DictionaryofAffect