@article{knuples-etal-2026-literally,
title = "Literally Concrete or Figuratively Abstract? Multilingual Concreteness Norms for Verb-Object Expressions",
author = "Knuple{\v{s}}, Urban and
Frassinelli, Diego and
Fraser, Alexander and
Walde, Sabine Schulte im",
journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
volume = "14",
year = "2026",
address = "Cambridge, MA",
publisher = "MIT Press",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.54/",
doi = "10.1162/tacl.a.703",
pages = "1205--1224",
abstract = "While existing concreteness norms primarily target words in isolation, little attention has been paid to concreteness in context. To address this, we systematically collect multilingual concreteness ratings using Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) for 5,814 verb-direct object noun expressions in three languages with different degrees of resource availability: English, German, and Slovene. We identify consistent patterns where the concreteness of verb-noun combinations is more strongly influenced by the nominal object than the verb. Through comparative analyses on an English subset, we demonstrate that BWS guarantees more reliable concreteness judgments than traditional rating scales. Expanding beyond our human-generated data, we use traditional and LLM-based automatic extrapolation methods to generate a large-scale multilingual resource of over 430,000 expressions. Additionally, we conduct a study examining the interaction between concreteness and literal vs. figurative judgments for a subset of 1,800 expressions in all three languages, along with example usage sentences. Our findings show that lower concreteness ratings correlate with figurative language, thus reinforcing the link between abstractness and figurativeness. All resources are available from https://github.com/urbikn/multilingual-concreteness-vo."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="knuples-etal-2026-literally">
<titleInfo>
<title>Literally Concrete or Figuratively Abstract? Multilingual Concreteness Norms for Verb-Object Expressions</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Urban</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Knupleš</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Diego</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Frassinelli</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Alexander</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Fraser</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sabine</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Schulte</namePart>
<namePart type="given">im</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Walde</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<genre authority="bibutilsgt">journal article</genre>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics</title>
</titleInfo>
<originInfo>
<issuance>continuing</issuance>
<publisher>MIT Press</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Cambridge, MA</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">periodical</genre>
<genre authority="bibutilsgt">academic journal</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>While existing concreteness norms primarily target words in isolation, little attention has been paid to concreteness in context. To address this, we systematically collect multilingual concreteness ratings using Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) for 5,814 verb-direct object noun expressions in three languages with different degrees of resource availability: English, German, and Slovene. We identify consistent patterns where the concreteness of verb-noun combinations is more strongly influenced by the nominal object than the verb. Through comparative analyses on an English subset, we demonstrate that BWS guarantees more reliable concreteness judgments than traditional rating scales. Expanding beyond our human-generated data, we use traditional and LLM-based automatic extrapolation methods to generate a large-scale multilingual resource of over 430,000 expressions. Additionally, we conduct a study examining the interaction between concreteness and literal vs. figurative judgments for a subset of 1,800 expressions in all three languages, along with example usage sentences. Our findings show that lower concreteness ratings correlate with figurative language, thus reinforcing the link between abstractness and figurativeness. All resources are available from https://github.com/urbikn/multilingual-concreteness-vo.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">knuples-etal-2026-literally</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.1162/tacl.a.703</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.54/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026</date>
<detail type="volume"><number>14</number></detail>
<extent unit="page">
<start>1205</start>
<end>1224</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Journal Article
%T Literally Concrete or Figuratively Abstract? Multilingual Concreteness Norms for Verb-Object Expressions
%A Knupleš, Urban
%A Frassinelli, Diego
%A Fraser, Alexander
%A Walde, Sabine Schulte im
%J Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
%D 2026
%V 14
%I MIT Press
%C Cambridge, MA
%F knuples-etal-2026-literally
%X While existing concreteness norms primarily target words in isolation, little attention has been paid to concreteness in context. To address this, we systematically collect multilingual concreteness ratings using Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) for 5,814 verb-direct object noun expressions in three languages with different degrees of resource availability: English, German, and Slovene. We identify consistent patterns where the concreteness of verb-noun combinations is more strongly influenced by the nominal object than the verb. Through comparative analyses on an English subset, we demonstrate that BWS guarantees more reliable concreteness judgments than traditional rating scales. Expanding beyond our human-generated data, we use traditional and LLM-based automatic extrapolation methods to generate a large-scale multilingual resource of over 430,000 expressions. Additionally, we conduct a study examining the interaction between concreteness and literal vs. figurative judgments for a subset of 1,800 expressions in all three languages, along with example usage sentences. Our findings show that lower concreteness ratings correlate with figurative language, thus reinforcing the link between abstractness and figurativeness. All resources are available from https://github.com/urbikn/multilingual-concreteness-vo.
%R 10.1162/tacl.a.703
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.54/
%U https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl.a.703
%P 1205-1224
Markdown (Informal)
[Literally Concrete or Figuratively Abstract? Multilingual Concreteness Norms for Verb-Object Expressions](https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.54/) (Knupleš et al., TACL 2026)
ACL