Concreteness and Subjectivity as Dimensions of Lexical Meaning
Hill, Felix and Korhonen, Anna

Article Structure

Abstract

We quantify the lexical subjectivity of adjectives using a corpus-based method, and show for the first time that it correlates with noun concreteness in large corpora.

Introduction

Concreteness, the degree to which language has a perceptible physical referent, and subjectivity, the extent to which linguistic meaning depends on the perspective of the speaker, are well established cognitive and linguistic notions.

Dimensions of meaning

Concreteness A large and growing body of empirical evidence indicates clear differences between concrete concepts, such as donut or hotdog and abstract concepts, such as guilt or obesity.

Analysis

In addressing (l), we extracted the 2,000 highest-frequency nouns from the Brysbaert et al.

CONC (noun concreteness)

Figure 1: Top: Performance of features in predicting subjectivity labels from the Wilson et al.

Conclusion

We have shown that objective adjectives are most likely to modify concrete nouns, and that non-

Topics

logistic regression

Appears in 3 sentences as: logistic regression (3)
In Concreteness and Subjectivity as Dimensions of Lexical Meaning
  1. To verify the quality of our subjectivity features, we measured their performance as predictors in a logistic regression classifying the 3,250 adjectives labelled as subjective or not in the Wilson et al.
    Page 3, “Analysis”
  2. ( logistic regression with 10-fold cross-validation), we test whether our lexical representations based on subjectivity and concreteness convey sufficient information to perform the same classification.
    Page 4, “CONC (noun concreteness)”
  3. We again aim to classify the remaining 211 intersective and 93 sub-sective pairs with a logistic regression .
    Page 4, “CONC (noun concreteness)”

See all papers in Proc. ACL 2014 that mention logistic regression.

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