@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-role,
    title = "On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions",
    author = "Wang, Weiqi  and
      Fang, Tianqing  and
      Shi, Haochen  and
      Xu, Baixuan  and
      Ding, Wenxuan  and
      Zhang, Liyu  and
      Fan, Wei  and
      Bai, Jiaxin  and
      Li, Haoran  and
      Liu, Xin  and
      Song, Yangqiu",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.122/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.122",
    pages = "2260--2281",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Conceptualization, a fundamental element of human cognition, plays a pivotal role in human generalizable reasoning.Generally speaking, it refers to the process of sequentially abstracting specific instances into higher-level concepts and then forming abstract knowledge that can be applied in unfamiliar or novel situations. This enhances models' inferential capabilities and supports the effective transfer of knowledge across various domains.Despite its significance, the broad nature of this term has led to inconsistencies in understanding conceptualization across various works, as there exists different types of instances that can be abstracted in a wide variety of ways.There is also a lack of a systematic overview that comprehensively examines existing works on the definition, execution, and application of conceptualization to enhance reasoning tasks.In this paper, we address these gaps by first proposing a categorization of different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized, in order to clarify the term and define the scope of our work.Then, we present the first comprehensive survey of over 150 papers, surveying various definitions, resources, methods, and downstream applications related to conceptualization into a unified taxonomy, with a focus on the entity and event levels.Furthermore, we shed light on potential future directions in this field and hope to garner more attention from the community."
}