Exploring Concreteness Through a Figurative Lens
Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word's concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are evident from context, it remains unclear how LLMs understand concreteness internally. We conduct a layer-wise and geometric analysis of LLM hidden representations across four model families, examining how models distinguish literal vs figurative uses of the same noun and how concreteness is organized in representation space. We find that LLMs separate literal and figurative usage in early layers, and that mid-to-late layers compress concreteness into a o...
| Authors | Saptarshi Ghosh, Tianyu Jiang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 April 2026 |
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