@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-making-concreteness,
    title = "Making ``concreteness'' more concrete",
    author = "Li, Yanting  and
      Scontras, Gregory  and
      Futrell, Richard",
    editor = "Voigt, Rob  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Feldman, Naomi  and
      Linzen, Tal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, CA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.31/",
    pages = "338--342",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-412-5",
    abstract = "Concrete words (e.g., apple) are often described in the literature to share more semantic features across languages than abstract words (e.g., appetite). We test this hypothesis using multilingual aligned word embeddings by measuring the distance between words and their nearest neighbor in other languages, and examining whether shorter distances predicted higher concreteness ratings in six languages: Dutch, English, French, Cypriot Greek, Mandarin, and Portuguese. The relationship between concreteness and cross-linguistic distance varied across languages, suggesting that concreteness does not uniformly correspond to cross-linguistic semantic relatedness. Our attempt highlights the potential of using aligned word embeddings for operationalizing psycholinguistic constructs."
}