Generics are expressions used to communicate abstractions about categories. While conveying general truths (e.g., “Birds fly”), generics have the interesting property to admit exceptions (e.g., penguins do not fly). Statements of this type help us organizing our knowledge of the world, and form the basis of how we express it (Hampton, 2012; Leslie, 2014).This study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) interpret generics, drawing upon psycholinguistic experimental methodologies. Understanding how LLMs interpret generic statements serves not only as a measure of their ability to abstract but also arguably plays a role in their encoding of stereotypes. Given that generics interpretation necessitates a comparison with explicitly quantified sentences, we explored i.) whether LLMs can correctly associate a quantifier with the generic structure, and ii.) whether the presence of a generic sentence as context influences the outcomes of quantifiers. We evaluated LLMs using both Surprisal distributions and prompting techniques.The findings indicate that models do not exhibit a strong sensitivity to quantification. Nevertheless, they seem to encode a meaning linked with the generic structure, which leads them to adjust their answers accordingly when a generalization is provided as context.

Noun-noun compounds interpretation is the task where a model is given one of such constructions, and it is asked to provide a paraphrase, making the semantic relation between the nouns explicit, as in carrot cake is “a cake made of carrots.” Such a task requires the ability to understand the implicit structured representation of the compound meaning. In this paper, we test to what extent the recent Large Language Models can interpret the semantic relation between the constituents of lexicalized English compounds and whether they can abstract from such semantic knowledge to predict the semantic relation between the constituents of similar but novel compounds by relying on analogical comparisons (e.g., carrot dessert). We test both Surprisal metrics and prompt-based methods to see whether i.) they can correctly predict the relation between constituents, and ii.) the semantic representation of the relation is robust to paraphrasing. Using a dataset of lexicalized and annotated noun-noun compounds, we find that LLMs can infer some semantic relations better than others (with a preference for compounds involving concrete concepts). When challenged to perform abstractions and transfer their interpretations to semantically similar but novel compounds, LLMs show serious limitations.

This paper introduces a novel annotation framework for the fine-grained modeling of Noun Phrases’ (NPs) genericity in natural language. The framework is designed to be simple and intuitive, making it accessible to non-expert annotators and suitable for crowd-sourced tasks. Drawing from theoretical and cognitive literature on genericity, this framework is grounded in established linguistic theory. Through a pilot study, we created a small but crucial annotated dataset of 324 sentences, serving as a foundation for future research. To validate our approach, we conducted an evaluation comparing our continuous annotations with existing binary annotations on the same dataset, demonstrating the framework’s effectiveness in capturing nuanced aspects of genericity. Our work offers a practical resource for linguists, providing a first annotated dataset and an annotation scheme designed to build real-language datasets that can be used in studies on the semantics of genericity, and NLP practitioners, contributing to the development of commonsense knowledge repositories valuable in enhancing various NLP applications.

Research on conceptual abstraction has investigated the differences in contextual distributions, or “contextual variability,” of abstract and concrete concept words (e.g., *love* vs. *cat*). Empirical studies on this topic show that abstract words tend to occur in diverse linguistic contexts, while concrete words are typically constrained within more homogeneous contexts. Nonetheless, these investigations have somewhat overlooked a factor that influences both abstract and concrete concepts: *Categorial Specificity*, which denotes the inclusiveness of a category (e.g., *ragdoll* vs. *mammal*). We argue that more specific words are tied to narrower domains, independently or whether they are concrete or abstract, thus resulting in a diminished degree of contextual variability when compared to generic terms. In this study, we used distributional models to investigate the interplay between contextual variability, concreteness, specificity, and their interaction. Analyzing 676 English nouns, we found that contextual variability is explained by both concreteness and specificity: more specific words have closer contexts, while generic words, whether abstract or concrete, exhibit less related contexts.

A large amount of literature on conceptual abstraction has investigated the differences in contextual distribution (namely “contextual variability”) between abstract and concrete concept words (“joy” vs. “apple”), showing that abstract words tend to be used in a wide variety of linguistic contexts. In contrast, concrete words usually occur in a few very similar contexts. However, these studies do not take into account another process that affects both abstract and concrete concepts alike: “specificity, that is, how inclusive a category is (“ragdoll” vs. “mammal”). We argue that the more a word is specific, the more its usage is tied to specific domains, and therefore its contextual variability is more limited compared to generic words. In this work, we used distributional semantic models to model the interplay between contextual variability measures and i) concreteness, ii) specificity, and iii) the interaction between the two variables. Distributional analyses on 662 Italian nouns showed that contextual variability is mainly explainable in terms of specificity or by the interaction between concreteness and specificity. In particular, the more specific a word is, the more its contexts will be close to it. In contrast, generic words have less related contexts, regardless of whether they are concrete or abstract.