A Preliminary Study on Inducing Lexical Concreteness from Dictionary Definitions

Oi Yee Kwong

2008

Abstract

While the distinction between concrete words and abstract words appears to be inherent, the measure of lexical concreteness relying on human ratings is more intuitive than objective. In this study, we aim at extending the concreteness distinction from the lexical level to the sense level, and inducing a numerical index of concreteness for individual senses and words from dictionary definitions. The high overall agreement between human ratings and definition-induced ratings is encouraging for us to further simulate the distinction from more language resources. Such a simulated index for concreteness is believed to inform not only lexicography but also natural language processing tasks like automatic word sense disambiguation.

References

  1. Bleasdale, F.A. (1987) Concreteness dependent associative priming: Separate lexical organization for concrete and abstract words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13:582-594.
  2. DeGroot, A.M.B. (1989) Representational aspects of word imageability and word frequency as assessed through word association. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15:824-845.
  3. Jackson, H. (2002) Lexicography: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.
  4. Kroll, J.F. and Merves, J.S. (1986) Lexical access for concrete and abstract words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12:92-107.
  5. Kwong, O.Y. (2005) Word Sense Classification Based on Information Susceptibility. In A. Lenci, S. Montemagni and V. Pirrelli (Eds.), Acquisition and Representation of Word Meaning. Linguistica Computazionale, pp.89-115.
  6. Kwong, O.Y. (2007) Sense Abstractness, Semantic Activation and Word Sense Disambiguation: Implications from Word Association Norms. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science (NLPCS-2007), Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, pp.169-178.
  7. McKeown, M.G. (1991) Learning Word Meanings from Definitions: Problems and Potential. In P.J. Schwanenflugel (Ed.), The Psychology of Word Meanings. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp.137-156.
  8. Resnik, P. and Yarowsky, D. (1999) Distinguishing systems and distinguishing senses: new evaluation methods for Word Sense Disambiguation. Natural Language Engineering, 5(2):113-133.
  9. Schwanenflugel, P.J. (1991) Why are Abstract Concepts Hard to Understand? In P.J. Schwanenflugel (Ed.), The Psychology of Word Meanings. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp.223-250.
  10. Swinney, D.A. (1979) Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18:645-659.
  11. WordNet 3.0, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
  12. Yore, L.D. and Ollila, L.O. (1985) Cognitive development, sex, and abstractness in grade one word recognition. Journal of Educational Research, 78:242-247.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Yee Kwong O. (2008). A Preliminary Study on Inducing Lexical Concreteness from Dictionary Definitions . In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science - Volume 1: NLPCS, (ICEIS 2008) ISBN 978-989-8111-45-6, pages 84-93. DOI: 10.5220/0001738400840093


in Bibtex Style

@conference{nlpcs08,
author={Oi Yee Kwong},
title={A Preliminary Study on Inducing Lexical Concreteness from Dictionary Definitions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science - Volume 1: NLPCS, (ICEIS 2008)},
year={2008},
pages={84-93},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001738400840093},
isbn={978-989-8111-45-6},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science - Volume 1: NLPCS, (ICEIS 2008)
TI - A Preliminary Study on Inducing Lexical Concreteness from Dictionary Definitions
SN - 978-989-8111-45-6
AU - Yee Kwong O.
PY - 2008
SP - 84
EP - 93
DO - 10.5220/0001738400840093