Browsing by Author "Saponaro, Alberto"

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Open Access
Automatic classification of abstractness in English rigid nouns
(2023) Saponaro, Alberto
The main difference between (i) Mass-Count Languages (such as English) and (ii)Classifiers Languages (such as Chinese) is that (i) encode the information about nouns’ countability in their grammar and (ii) employ a classification system of classifiers to distinguish between individuals or substance. If the mass-count distinction is a characteristic of mass-count language, the substance-individuals denotation seems to be a concept universally available for all humans. Another concept that appears to be universally accessible and linked to the countability status of English nouns is the notion of abstractness. Then, mass nouns usually refer to an abstract object, and this is confirmed from the distribution of abstractness in the dataset. This thesis’ objective is to provide a model for the classification of rigid nouns (count or mass only) that is capable to generalize on the degree of abstractness. Additionally, it tests if a model trained with the same set of features is capable of rating the abstractness of those nouns. To accomplish these tasks, several sets of features are being identified based on syntactic and semantic properties of nouns that describe the mass-count distinction. The results indicate that the first model M1, a mass-count classifier that predicts the countability class of a rigid noun, provides reliable predictions and can generalize on the degree of abstractness of the targets. The second model M2, an abstractness rate predictor that assigns an abstractness rate from 1 to 5 to a rigid noun, is incapable of providing reliable ratings and cannot generalize on the countability status of the targets. A third model M3, an abstract-concrete (binary) classifier that predicts the abstractness class of a rigid noun, provides reliable predictions and can generalize on the countability status of the targets. Given that those results concerns rigid nouns only, further research can be conducted by examining the abstractness of elastic nouns. However, there is the need of an annotation that rates abstractness of nouns senses.