Publications

Publication details [#1312]

Hill, Felix, Anna Korhonen and Christian Bentz. 2013. Large-Scale Empirical Analyses of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction. Cognitive Science Proceedings.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Abstract

The paper shows evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and represented differently. The research is based on statistical analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available datasets. Abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Then the paper tesst recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity.Finally, the paper shows evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more strongly feature-based than abstract representations. The authors argue that degree of feature-based structure may fundamentally determine concreteness,and discuss implications for cognitive and computational models of meaning.