Evaluating Textual and Visual Semantic Neighborhoods of Abstract and Concrete Concepts

Sven Naber, Diego Frassinelli, Sabine Schulte Im Walde


Abstract
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of nearest neighbors in a range of semantic spaces across textual and visual modalities.Focusing on the abstractness-concreteness continuum, we define an overlap measure to compare concepts differing in their linguistic vs. perceptual nature, and indeed find that alignment is primarily determined by modality and concreteness: Models from the same modality show stronger alignment than cross-modal models, and spaces of concrete concepts show stronger alignment than those of abstract ones.
Anthology ID:
2025.starsem-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Lea Frermann, Mark Stevenson
Venue:
*SEM
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
142–151
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.starsem-1.11/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sven Naber, Diego Frassinelli, and Sabine Schulte Im Walde. 2025. Evaluating Textual and Visual Semantic Neighborhoods of Abstract and Concrete Concepts. In Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025), pages 142–151, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Textual and Visual Semantic Neighborhoods of Abstract and Concrete Concepts (Naber et al., *SEM 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.starsem-1.11.pdf