Measuring Concept Concreteness from the Lexicographic Perspective

The distinction between concrete and abstract concepts is psychologically valid but so far it can hardly be quantified in any objective way, which prevents it from being further studied in computational linguistics. This paper proposes a systematic way to measure concreteness from the surface structure of dictionary definitions. Comparing the scores from WordNet definitions with human ratings, the method apparently works better for concrete senses than abstract ones, and is not adequate for measuring concreteness on a finer scale beyond the simple dichotomous distinction. Future work thus includes exploring the possibility of deploying a wider range of surface clues from definitions for the purpose and investigating how the method works with definitions from different dictionaries.