What is the Color of Serendipity? Investigating the Use of Language Models for Semantically Resonant Color Generation

Humans inherently connect certain colors with particular concepts in semantically meaningful ways that facilitate visual communication. These colors are known as semantically resonant colors. For instance, we associate "sky" and "ocean" with shades of blue, and "cherry" with red. In this paper, we investigate how language models, including Word2Vec, RoBERTa, GPT-4o mini and the vision language model CLIP generate and represent nuanced semantically resonant colors for diverse concepts. To achieve this, we utilized a large dataset of color names and concepts, tailored models for the structure of each language model, and developed an interactive web interface, Concept2Color, as a use case. Additionally, we conducted experiments and a detailed analysis to assess the ability of these models to generate meaningful colors. Through these experiments, we examined how factors such as model design, training data and context affect the color output. Our findings reveal the capabilities and limitations of language models in processing and generating semantically resonant colors for concepts, thus contributing insights into how they depict semantic color-concept connections. These insights have implications for data visualization, design, and human-computer interaction, where leveraging effective semantic color generation can enhance communication and user experience.