Contextual Characteristics of Concrete and Abstract Words

In this work we investigate commonalities and differences between the semantic representations of concrete and abstract words using human judgments and distributional semantics. We tackle the following questions: a) Does distributional similarity imply similarity in concreteness vs. abstractness? b) How do concrete and abstract context words co-occur with concrete and abstract words? c) Are our contextual models in line with existing theories of meaning representation? Our studies show that both distributionally similar words as well as distributionally co-occurring words come from the same range of concreteness vs. abstractness scores, partly challenging existing theories of semantic representation.