Abstract
Psycholinguistic evidence has thus suggested the differential processing of concrete and abstract concepts by the human mind. This chapter further explores the mental lexicon with respect to the concreteness and abstractness of concepts based on word association data. Since lexical resources including computational semantic lexicons play a critical role in automatic word sense disambiguation, we aim at investigating to what extent such concreteness distinction is modelled in existing lexical resources. It was observed that concrete and abstract noun senses tend to exhibit consistently different lexical activation patterns, and the results suggest that sense concreteness may serve as a possible alternative classification of word senses relevant to the lexical sensitivity of word sense disambiguation, as well as to the contributions of different knowledge sources in the task.
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Notes
- 1.
We use concreteness as a generic term to refer to a continuum between highly concrete and highly abstract concepts.
- 2.
- 3.
The hierarchical chain between FruitOrVegetable and Physical in SUMO is: FruitOrVegetable < ReproductiveBody < BodyPart < OrganicObject < CorpuscularObject < SelfConnectedObject < Object < Physical, where A < B means A is subsumed under a more general concept B. The chain linking SubjectiveAssessmentAttribute and Abstract is: SubjectiveAssessmentAttribute < NormativeAttribute < RelationalAttribute < Attribute < Abstract.
- 4.
But this does not preclude any broader associations or syntagmatic responses which might not be detected with the limited associations obtained from WordNet.
- 5.
According to Vossen et al. (1989), “shunters” refer to where the definition for a noun is shifted from a nominal structure to a non-nominal one.
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Kwong, O.Y. (2013). Sense Concreteness and Lexical Activation. In: New Perspectives on Computational and Cognitive Strategies for Word Sense Disambiguation. SpringerBriefs in Electrical and Computer Engineering(). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1320-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1320-2_5
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