Ranking concrete and abstract words using Google Books Ngram data

Abstract

© 2020 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved. Creation of dictionaries of abstract and concrete words is a well-known task. Such dictionaries are important in several applications of text analysis and computational linguistics. Usually, the process of assembling of concreteness scores for words begins with a lot of manual work. However, the process can be automated significantly using information from large corpora. In this paper we combine two datasets: a dictionary with concreteness scores of 40,000 English words and the GoogleBooks Ngram dataset, in order to test the following hypothesis: in text concrete words tend to occur with more concrete words, than with abstract words (and inverse: abstract words tend to occur with more abstract words, than with concrete words). Using the hypothesis, we proposed a method for automatic evaluation concreteness scores of words using a small amount of initial markup.