Sven Naber
2025
Evaluating Textual and Visual Semantic Neighborhoods of Abstract and Concrete Concepts
Sven Naber
|
Diego Frassinelli
|
Sabine Schulte Im Walde
Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)
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.