Daniela Naumann
2018
Quantitative Semantic Variation in the Contexts of Concrete and Abstract Words
Daniela Naumann
|
Diego Frassinelli
|
Sabine Schulte im Walde
Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics
Across disciplines, researchers are eager to gain insight into empirical features of abstract vs. concrete concepts. In this work, we provide a detailed characterisation of the distributional nature of abstract and concrete words across 16,620 English nouns, verbs and adjectives. Specifically, we investigate the following questions: (1) What is the distribution of concreteness in the contexts of concrete and abstract target words? (2) What are the differences between concrete and abstract words in terms of contextual semantic diversity? (3) How does the entropy of concrete and abstract word contexts differ? Overall, our studies show consistent differences in the distributional representation of concrete and abstract words, thus challenging existing theories of cognition and providing a more fine-grained description of their nature.
2017
Contextual Characteristics of Concrete and Abstract Words
Diego Frassinelli
|
Daniela Naumann
|
Jason Utt
|
Sabine Schulte m Walde
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) — Short papers
Search