Sven Naber
2025
Evaluating Textual and Visual Semantic Neighborhoods of Abstract and Concrete Concepts
Sven Naber
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Diego Frassinelli
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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 across semantic representation spaces in both textual and visual modalities. We focus on nominal concepts with varying concreteness levels, and apply a neighborhood overlap measure to compare these target concepts differing in their linguistic and perceptual nature. We find that alignment is primarily determined by modality, and additionally by level of 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. Overall, larger neighborhood size strengthens the alignment between spaces.