Fragrance lexicon for analysis of consumer-generated perfume reviews in Russian and English

In recent years, there has been a rise in research on sensorium in various academic disciplines. Olfaction is recognized as a sense that is most closely linked to cognition, memory and emotion. Due to this unique feature, studies on various aspects of human olfaction are steadily gaining prominence in the humanities and social sciences. In order to understand how the olfactory modality is marked, several taxonomies and semantic spaces of olfactory terms have been developed. However, the focus has been on the general olfaction lexicon and there is a lack of systematic and comprehensive lexicons for fragrant smells. This article addresses this gap. It adopts a multilingual perspective and describes the process of developing a fragrance lexicon in two languages, Russian and English. A fragrance lexicon refers to a list of words that people might use to describe a perfume. The steps in the lexicon development included•sourcing the lexical items in the two languages•translating and cleaning the word lists•revising and refining the lexiconThe fragrance lexicon presented in this article can be used to aid linguistic analyses of naturally occurring communications about perfumes, such as computational analyses of consumer-generated perfume reviews.Graphical abstract