Web-imageability of the Behavioral Features of Basic-level Concepts

The recent research direction toward multimodal semantic representation would be further advanced, if we could have a machinery to collect adequate images from the Web, given a target concept. With this motivation, this paper particularly investigates into the Web imageabilities of the behavioral features (e.g. “beaver builds dams”) of a basic-level concept (beaver). The term Web-imageability denotes how adequately the images acquired from the Web deliver the intended meaning of a complex concept. The primary contributions made in this paper are twofold: (1) “beaver building dams”-type queries can better yield relevant Web images, suggesting that the present participle form (“-ing” form) of a verb (“building”), as a query component, is more effective than the base form; (2) the behaviors taken by animate beings are likely to be more depicted on the Web, particularly if the behaviors are, in a sense, inherent to animate beings (e.g.,motion, consumption), while the creation-type behaviors of inanimate beings are not. The paper further analyzes linguistic annotations that were independently given to some of the images, and discusses an aspect of the semantic gap between image and language.