Distributional Interaction of Concreteness and Abstractness in Verb–Noun Subcategorisation

Diego Frassinelli, Sabine Schulte im Walde


Abstract
In recent years, both cognitive and computational research has provided empirical analyses of contextual co-occurrence of concrete and abstract words, partially resulting in inconsistent pictures. In this work we provide a more fine-grained description of the distributional nature in the corpus-based interaction of verbs and nouns within subcategorisation, by investigating the concreteness of verbs and nouns that are in a specific syntactic relationship with each other, i.e., subject, direct object, and prepositional object. Overall, our experiments show consistent patterns in the distributional representation of subcategorising and subcategorised concrete and abstract words. At the same time, the studies reveal empirical evidence why contextual abstractness represents a valuable indicator for automatic non-literal language identification.
Anthology ID:
W19-0506
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Short Papers
Month:
May
Year:
2019
Address:
Gothenburg, Sweden
Editors:
Simon Dobnik, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Vera Demberg
Venue:
IWCS
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
38–43
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0506
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-0506
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Diego Frassinelli and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2019. Distributional Interaction of Concreteness and Abstractness in Verb–Noun Subcategorisation. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Short Papers, pages 38–43, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distributional Interaction of Concreteness and Abstractness in Verb–Noun Subcategorisation (Frassinelli & Schulte im Walde, IWCS 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-0506.pdf