Conceptual Abstractness: from Nouns to Verbs
p. 137-142
Résumés
Investigating lexical access, representation and processing involves dealing with conceptual abstractness: abstract concepts are known to be more quickly and easily delivered in human communications than abstract meanings (Binder et al., 2005). Although these aspects have long been left unexplored, they are relevant: abstract terms are widespread in ordinary language, as they contribute to the realisation of various sorts of figurative language (metaphors, metonymies, hyperboles, etc.). Abstractness is therefore an issue for computational linguistics, as well. In this paper we illustrate how to characterise verbs with abstractness information. We provide an experimental evaluation of the presented approach on the largest existing corpus annotated with abstraction scores: our results exhibit good correlation with human ratings, and point out some open issues that will be addressed in future work.
In questo lavoro presentiamo il tema dell’astrattezza come una caratteristica diffusa del linguaggio, e un nodo cruciale nell’elaborazione automatica del linguaggio. In particolare illustriamo un metodo per la stima dell’astrattezza che caratterizza i verbi a partire dalla composizione dei punteggi di astrattezza degli argomenti dei verbi utilizzando la risorsa Abs-COVER.
Texte intégral
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 Modal or symbolic views of cognition should not be confused with the symbolic AI, based on high-level representations of problems, as outlined by the pioneering work by Newell and Simon (such as, e.g., in (Newell, 1980)), that was concerned with physical symbol systems
3 COVER is a lexical resource developed in the frame of a long-standing research aimed at combining ontological and common-sense reasoning (Ghignone et al., 2013; Lieto et al., 2015; Lieto et al., 2017).
4 Featured by the WordNet synset ID wn:02866578n.
5 We presently consider the following dimensions: RelatedTo, FormOf, IsA, Synonym, DerivedFrom, SimilarTo and AtLocation.
6 https://www.english-corpora.org/.
7 http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=corpora.
8 Disambiguation proper would require to select a sense in accordance with a given context.
Auteurs
Dipartimento di Informatica – Università degli Studi di Torino – davide.colla[at]unito.it
Dipartimento di Informatica – Università degli Studi di Torino – enrico.mensa[at]unito.it
Dipartimento di Informatica – Università degli Studi di Torino – aureliano.porporato[at]unito.it
Dipartimento di Informatica – Università degli Studi di Torino – daniele.radicioni[at]unito.it
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