Abstract
Across disciplines, researchers are eager to gain insight into empirical features of abstract vs. concrete concepts. In this work, we provide a detailed characterisation of the distributional nature of abstract and concrete words across 16,620 English nouns, verbs and adjectives. Specifically, we investigate the following questions: (1) What is the distribution of concreteness in the contexts of concrete and abstract target words? (2) What are the differences between concrete and abstract words in terms of contextual semantic diversity? (3) How does the entropy of concrete and abstract word contexts differ? Overall, our studies show consistent differences in the distributional representation of concrete and abstract words, thus challenging existing theories of cognition and providing a more fine-grained description of their nature.- Anthology ID:
- S18-2008
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- Editors:
- Malvina Nissim, Jonathan Berant, Alessandro Lenci
- Venue:
- *SEM
- SIGs:
- SIGSEM | SIGLEX
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 76–85
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/S18-2008
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/S18-2008
- Cite (ACL):
- Daniela Naumann, Diego Frassinelli, and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2018. Quantitative Semantic Variation in the Contexts of Concrete and Abstract Words. In Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, pages 76–85, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Quantitative Semantic Variation in the Contexts of Concrete and Abstract Words (Naumann et al., *SEM 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-bitext-workshop/S18-2008.pdf