Quantitative Semantic Variation in the Contexts of Concrete and Abstract Words

Proceedings of the 7th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), pages 76–85 New Orleans, June 5-6, 2018. c⃝2018 Association for Computational Linguistics Quantitative Semantic Variation in the Contexts of Concrete and Abstract Words Daniela Naumann Diego Frassinelli Sabine Schulte im Walde Institut f¨ur Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Universit¨at Stuttgart {naumanda,frassinelli,schulte}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de Abstract Across disciplines, researchers are eager to gain insight into empirical features of abstract vs. concrete concepts. In this work, we pro- vide a detailed characterisation of the distri- butional nature of abstract and concrete words across 16,620 English nouns, verbs and ad- jectives. Specifically, we investigate the fol- lowing questions: (1) What is the distribu- tion of concreteness in the contexts of con- crete and abstract target words? (2) What are the differences between concrete and abstract words in terms of contextual semantic diver- sity? (3) How does the entropy of concrete and abstract word contexts differ? Overall, our studies show consistent differences in the dis- tributional representation of concrete and ab- stract words, thus challenging existing theories of cognition and providing a more fine-grained description of their nature. 1 Introduction The complete understanding of the cognitive mechanisms behind the processing of concrete and abstract meanings represents a key and still open question in cognitive science (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005). More specifically, the psycholinguistic literature reports extensive analy- ses of how concrete concepts are processed, how- ever there is still little consensus about the na- ture of abstract concepts (Barsalou and Wiemer- Hastings, 2005; McRae and Jones, 2013; Hill et al., 2014; Vigliocco et al., 2014). The Context Availability Theory represents one of the earliest theoretical approaches aiming to ac- count for the differences between concrete and abstract concepts (Schwanenflugel and Shoben, 1983). This theory suggests that meaning arises from the ability to create an appropriate context for a concept, which has proven to be more chal- lenging (i.e., enforcing higher reaction times and larger number of errors) for abstract than for con- crete concepts. In a computational study, Hill et al. (2014) quantitatively analysed the distinc- tion between concrete and abstract words in a large corpus. Overall, they showed that abstract words occur within a broad range of context words while concrete words occur within a smaller set of context words. Similarly, Hoffman et al. (2013) and Hoffman and Woollams (2015) analysed the concrete vs. abstract dichotomy in terms of their semantic diversity, demonstrating that concrete words occur within highly similar contexts while abstract words occur in a broad range of less asso- ciated contexts (i.e., exhibiting high semantic di- versity). These computational findings are fully in line with the Context Availability Theory: the processing time of concrete words is generally shorter than the processing time of abstract words, as abstract words are attached to a broad range of loosely associated words. More recently, embodied theories of cogni- tion have suggested that word meanings are grounded in the sensory-motor system (Barsa- lou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002; Hill et al., 2014; Pecher et al., 2011). According …

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