Abstract

Making "concreteness" more concrete

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Abstract

Concrete words (e.g., apple) are often described in the literature to share more semantic features across languages than abstract words (e.g., appetite). We test this hypothesis using multilingual aligned word embeddings by measuring the distance between words and their nearest neighbor in other languages, and examining whether shorter distances predicted higher concreteness ratings in six languages: Dutch, English, French, Cypriot Greek, Mandarin, and Portuguese. The relationship between concreteness and cross-linguistic distance varied across languages, suggesting that concreteness does not uniformly correspond to cross-linguistic semantic relatedness. Our attempt highlights the potential of using aligned word embeddings for operationalizing psycholinguistic constructs.

Keywords: concreteness, multilingual word embeddings, cross-linguistic semantics

How to Cite:

Li, Y., Scontras, G. & Futrell, R., (2026) “Making "concreteness" more concrete”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4034