Construction and Application of a Large-Scale Chinese Abstractness Lexicon Based on Word Similarity

As an important semantic feature, abstractness has been widely studied in linguistics, psychology, cognitive sciences and other fields. Many languages have constructed their abstractness lexicons, while there has never been a large-scale and high-quality abstractness lexicon in Chinese. Since manual construction is time-consuming and costly, we use the existing resources with human abstractness scores as original data, and adopt the word similarity-based approach to automatically construct a large-scale Chinese abstractness lexicon. Besides, we evaluate the quality of the constructed lexicon by comparing it with expert knowledge and previous work. It has been verified that this lexicon is roughly consistent with human cognition and can provide reliable abstractness ratings for words. Finally, the performance of this constructed lexicon on two research, cross-language comparison and Chinese text readability auto-evaluation, shows that word abstractness is an important feature in investigating cognitive differences and text complexity. The large-scale Chinese abstractness lexicon constructed in this paper has important application values.