Words, the building blocks of language, serve as labels that define various categories. Some words define tangible entities like cats and tables, while others define abstract concepts such as legacy and empathy. Moreover, certain words define broad, inclusive categories like vehicles and art, while others pinpoint more specific ones, like sport cars or Impressionism. These two axes of variation are called concreteness and specificity, respectively.
In the pursuit of extracting meaning from our experiences, we engage in the construction of diverse categories through the mechanisms of abstraction. Concreteness and specificity emerge as pivotal variables that underpin these abstractions.
Yet, when delving into the study of abstraction, scholars across various disciplines tend to focus solely on specificity or solely on concreteness. This singular focus, grounded in different and partial definitions of abstraction, hinders the interdisciplinary dialogue, impairs the debate, and jeopardizes theoretical development. This challenge is exacerbated by the absence of human-generated resources to measure specificity.
The innovative ABSTRACTION team aims to address this gap by collecting specificity data for thousands of words in both English and Italian, employing a gamification technique. Leveraging the lexical resources obtained through gamification, alongside other lexical resources, our approach involves conducting extensive statistical analyses, designed to unravel the interplay between specificity and concreteness in three crucial domains:
Thought: Shedding light on conflicting findings previously attributed solely to concreteness, our research seeks to explain how specificity contributes to the formation of abstract thoughts.
Language: By investigating the optimal clarity and informativeness of texts for diverse readerships, we aim to construct language that transcends traditional boundaries and resonates with a broad audience.
Creativity: Exploring the role of specificity and concreteness in constructing effective metaphors across various contexts, our research aims to unravel the creative process and enhance metaphorical expression.
The ABSTRACTION project endeavors to elucidate how the interplay of word specificity and concreteness empowers us to extract meaning from experiences. This exploration extends to the realm of cognitive science, where the grounding of abstract concepts remains an open question, and in AI research, where the construction and utilization of concepts in a manner akin to human cognition is yet to be fully understood.
