Identifying Abstract and Concrete Words in F rench to Better Address Reading Difficulties (2020)

Abstract: Literature in psycholinguistics and neurosciences has showed that abstract and concrete concepts are perceived differently by our brain, and that the abstractness of a word can cause difficulties in reading. In order to integrate this parameter into an automatic text simplification (ATS) system for French readers, an annotated list with 7,898 abstract and concrete nouns has been semi-automatically developed. Our aim was to obtain abstract and concrete nouns from an initial manually annotated short list by using two distributional approaches: nearest neighbors and syntactic co-occurrences. The results of this experience have enabled to shed light on the different behaviors of concrete and abstract nouns in context. Besides, the final list, a resource per se in French available on demand, provides a valuable contribution since annotated resources based on cognitive variables such as concreteness or abstractness are scarce and very difficult to obtain. In future work, the list will be enlarged and integrated into an existing lexicon with ranked synonyms for the identification of complex words in text simplification applications.

## 180 369 the next step was to automatically extract, for each of these 369 words, the 50 nearest neighbors and 50 syntactic cooccurrences obtained from the resource les voisins de le monde 3 and to compare the output of each approach (a sample of the list can be found in the appendix b).