The notions of concreteness and imageability, traditionally important in psycholinguistics, are gaining significance in semantic-oriented natural language processing tasks. In this paper we investigate the predictability of these two concepts via supervised learning, using word embeddings as explanatory variables. We perform predictions both within and across languages by exploiting collections of cross-lingual embeddings aligned to a single vector space. We show that the notions of concreteness and imageability are highly predictable both within and across languages, with a moderate loss of up to 20 in correlation when predicting across languages. We further show that the cross-lingual transfer via word embeddings is more efficient than the simple transfer via bilingual dictionaries.
performed metaphor detection, using, among others, concreteness and imageability as their features. To propagate these features, obtained from the MRC psycholinguistic database @cite_3 to the entire lexicon, they used a supervised learning algorithm on vector space representations, where each vector element represented a feature. Performance of these classifiers was 0.94 for concreteness and 0.85 for imageability. They also applied the concreteness and imageability features to other languages by projecting features with bilingual dictionaries.
@cite_3
2017433125
The MRC machine-usable dictionary contains 150,837 words and up 26 linguistic and psycholinguistic attributes for each. The attributes are from sources that are publicly available but are difficult to obtain and structure into a single dictionary. Three utility programs are described that permit the selection of words defined by a set of specified attribute values and the selection of attribute values for a set of specified words. These programs permit the construction of word sets for psycholinguistic experiments that control for the attributes specified in the dictionary. The dictionary may also be of use to researchers in artificial intelligence and computer science who require psychological and linguistic descriptions of words.