Concrete and Abstract – natural language sematics and explain

Concrete and Abstract – natural language sematics and explain

The perspectives of concreteness and abstraction are very important for semantic approaches to natural language processing and structural machine learning. I summarized them from “Concreteness and Abstraction: How the Intelligence Sees the World Differently“.

The world around us is made up of two opposing concepts, “concrete” and “abstract. The word “concrete” is most often used when explaining something in a way that is easy to understand, such as “To put it concretely…” The word “concreteness” is most often used when explaining something in a simple way, such as “In concrete terms…” or when you don’t understand what the other person is saying, such as “Could you be more specific? The word “abstract,” on the other hand, is used to describe a situation. On the other hand, the word “abstract” can be used in the context of “I don’t understand what that person is talking about because it’s so abstract.

In this way, the generally accepted impression of these concepts is that “concrete” means easy to understand and “abstract” means difficult to understand. As you can see, the word “abstraction” is often associated with a negative impression, but in fact it is the most basic of all human thoughts, and it is the concept that makes us human and definitely different from animals.

The concept of abstraction is so powerful that it is no exaggeration to say that “he who controls abstraction controls thought.” Being aware of the back and forth between “concrete” and “abstract” will definitely change your world.

The act of thinking with our minds is actually mostly a “back and forth between the concrete and the abstract” in one form or another, which also means that “concretization” and “abstraction” are at the root of brain activity that only humans possess. These concepts of “concrete” and “abstract” can be summarized as follows.

The concrete is usually directly related to “visible” observable entities, while the abstract is “invisible” and deviates from the actual situation. Although there is a word “concrete” that precisely corresponds to abstract, I will use the commonly used and highly recognized word “concrete” here.

Concreteness corresponds to each individual event, while abstraction is a generalization of the common features that unite them. In other words, there is an “N:1” correspondence where one abstract corresponds to multiple (N) concretes.

Therefore, concrete expressions have a low degree of freedom of interpretation, i.e., there is almost no difference in interpretation among people, while abstract expressions have a high degree of freedom of interpretation and can be interpreted very differently by different people. A high degree of freedom of interpretation means that it can be applied, and this is the most important characteristic of abstractions.

The job of scholars and theorists is usually to theorize and lawify multiple events by generalizing and abstracting them to make them useful and general-purpose for everyone. On the other hand, it is difficult to implement the theorized things as they are, so it is necessary to concretize them. For this reason, practitioners emphasize implementation at the concrete level.

Typical examples of what humans have created using abstraction are “numbers” and “words”. By creating these tools, people have been able to freely manipulate words and numbers, accumulate knowledge, construct useful theories like science, and develop and utilize various “tools” by making them reproducible.

Without words, communication and transmission of knowledge would be impossible, and the development and transmission of various tools, paper, and technology is only possible because words and numbers (and symbols) can be used to describe and record them.

“In order for “numbers” and “words” to be valid, it is essential to think of them as “all the same. First of all, when it comes to numbers, the number “three” is formed by considering three apples, three dogs, and three books to be the same. In the same way, tuna, salmon, and bonito are all called “fish,” which makes it possible to say, “Let’s eat fish,” or “Fish is good for your health,” which in turn advances the study of “fish. If we try to describe these things without using the word “fish” (or an equivalent word), we will have to name all the individual fish.

This relationship between the concrete and the abstract can be expressed as follows.

This triangle will be an abstract statement of the following.

• The relationship between concreteness⇄abstraction is that concreteness ⇄abstraction is an “N:1” relationship (so it expands as you go down).
• The relation concretization⇄abstraction is one of relative continuity. (For example, “salmon” is both the concrete of “fish” and the abstraction of individual salmon, so it depends on how you look at it relatively.)

Human language ability becomes inextricably linked to the ability to abstract. For example, when I think of a thought experiment that says I can now automatically translate with my dog.

"I'm going to eat. 
- What? What do you mean? "What do you mean, "eat"? 
- I mean, "feed." 
- What? What's that? "What do you mean, "feed"? 
- It's low-fat food, made by SuperPet... 
- What? I don't know what I can eat after all. 
- You ate it last night, didn't you? You ate it last night, didn't you? It's that stuff you leave next to the shoe box at the entrance. 
- I had no idea what you were talking about because you used such difficult words.

Dogs, even if they can talk, have good comprehension of abstracted concepts, so the conversation would end up like the one on the right. Basically, if you can’t show them something “concrete,” they won’t understand it because it’s too abstract for words. In fact, the above conversation also uses abstract concepts, so even this kind of Kawai is not something that a dog can easily do.

Abstraction, in a nutshell, means “cutting off the branches and leaves and looking at the trunk. This literally means “extracting features,” which means to extract features that are common to other things from real events that have various features and attributes, and handle them all together.

On the other hand, this means that all other features that are not related to the common features are discarded. In the previous words, the “common features” are the trunk and the “other features” are the branches and leaves.

What characteristics are extracted from a single event depends on the purpose and direction of the event. “Even for a single person, there are various ways of extracting characteristics such as “student,” “healthy,” “70 kg person,” “unmarried,” etc.

For example, in order to abstract a single person, we need to know whether the person is a man or a woman in the case of a public bath or a toilet, or whether the person is a working adult, a student, or a child in the case of determining the price of a movie theater.

As the basic principle of abstraction is to “cut off the branches and leaves,” it is negative to pay more attention to details than necessary, but on the other hand, as the saying goes, “God is in the details,” attention to details is sometimes important. In the case of trees, which one is the most important?

In the case of trees, it is fixed which are the trunks and which are the branches and leaves, but the trunks and branches in abstraction differ depending on the purpose. However, because it is difficult to change our obsession depending on our purpose, many people around us seem to be “obsessed with branches and leaves.

Verbs like “throw” and “kick”. “Nouns like “posture” and “foundation. “Adjectives like “beautiful” and “gentle. “Adjectives such as “straight” and “beautiful. All of these words can be used in two ways, either in the visible physical world or in the mental world as metaphors.

For example, we associate the physical action of “throwing” (a ball) with the abstract concept of “giving up and abandoning” and use the same word for throwing. This way of thinking, in which the movement of the body is compared to the movement of the mind, is not limited to Japanese, but is found in other languages as well, and is also due to the innate “sense” that humans have.

In this way, the human brain is capable of expanding its range of thinking by extending events that are occurring in the tangible world to the mental world (or, as in the case of “easy on the eyes,” by expanding expressions from the mental world to the physical world in the opposite direction).

Extending the actual physical world to the emotions and logic of the mental world, and creating a world similar to the physical world only in one’s mind (for example, the psychological situation of “giving up” should not be explicitly visible to the people around you), is an intellectual feat that only humans can do.

Animals only have a physical world (perhaps), and if they have a mental world, it is very small compared to the human world, and (perhaps) very little of it is directly connected to the physical world. It is thanks to the act of abstraction that humans enjoy and are sad, “for better or worse. Abstraction expands the human mental world dozens of times.

The greatest merit of abstraction is that by grouping multiple things with common characteristics and considering them as “the same,” it becomes possible to apply the learning from one event to other situations. In other words, we can learn ten things by listening to one.

Thus, we can say that abstraction is the ability of “pattern recognition” to find laws between multiple events. We find patterns in the things around us, give them names, and use them as laws in multiple situations. This is one of the great advantages of human intelligence through abstraction.

Looking at individual events at the concrete level one by one in isolation would not only take an infinite amount of time, but also would not be applicable to any one talent. In general, a “law” is a uniform formula that can be applied to a large number of things, thereby making it possible to think overwhelmingly efficiently.

Laws here include not only physical laws, but also heuristics (rules of thumb such as “if the sun sets, it will be sunny tomorrow”) and implicit judgments, such as being able to read a conversation partner’s anger or happiness from his or her facial expression.

Among the concepts of abstraction, there is an aspect of “relationship and structure” other than the ones mentioned so far. The level of concreteness is basically the world of “individual and discrete”, and if concreteness is to treat all the events individually, abstraction is to treat them collectively as “relationship” or “structure”. (Figure below)

Since “structure” here refers to a complex set of relationships between two or more parties, it is basically the difference between thinking in terms of “single items” and “relationships.

The aforementioned abstraction of salmon -> fish -> animal . The abstraction “salmon→fish→animal…” is basically a relation in which the former is a “subset” of the latter (simply inclusive), whereas the word “opposites” (concept), for example, is an abstraction of the “relationship” between two words, such as agree⇄disagree, auto⇄manual.

Relationships are generally not directly visible, which is similar to the previous abstraction. Physical laws, for example, Newton’s equation of motion, F=ma, also expresses the “relationship” that force (F) is the product of mass (m) and acceleration (a).

The ability of abstraction to generalize relationships into laws also makes an invaluable contribution to the development of human knowledge. In order to understand “relationships” in this way, it is necessary to look at events not individually, but from the “top” by grouping together a certain number of events.

For specific relationship years, there is the study of history. Memorizing the chronology of each individual event is not enough to see the relationship between them, and one of the main meanings of studying history is to understand the “cause-and-effect relationship” and apply it to the future.

One of the tools for abstraction is a simple diagram. Diagrams are used to express “relationships,” which means that the “individuality” of each figure is minimized to “circles” or “triangles,” and only the relative relationships among them are expressed.

“Parables can be said to be the process of “translating” a subject into something else that has the same structure at an abstract level and is familiar to the audience, in order to make the subject you are trying to explain more concrete. A good storyteller, for example, is one who is skilled in “translation through a back-and-forth motion from concrete to abstract to concrete.

The conditions for a good parable are as follows.

• The subject of the parable is a familiar and concrete theme that can be easily understood by anyone.
• The similarities between the subject being explained and the theme at right are abstracted and expressed “without excess or deficiency.

It is the second condition that determines the “quality of the abstraction”: it is important that the similarities are such that they do not apply elsewhere, and that the differences between the two domains are not related to the point you want to illustrate. (An analogy that doesn’t do so will not fit and will be “a little different somehow.)

In other words, having the right grasp of “similarities and differences” is what determines the abstraction, and thus the quality of the parable.

Studies are more or less dealing with abstract concepts, but if we separate “reciprocating motion,” that is, “abstraction” and “concretization,” we can see that even among them, there are some that focus mainly on “abstraction” and others that focus mainly on “concretization.

For example, there are two science-related disciplines, “science” and “engineering,” which are “opposite” in some respects. This is because there is a difference between “abstraction” (concrete to abstract) (science) and “concretization” (abstract to concrete) (engineering).

While the purpose of most academic studies is to increase versatility by deriving theories from concrete events and abstracting them into theories, the main purpose of engineering is to create application examples from basic principles and put them into practice.

Mathematics and philosophy are representative of disciplines that thoroughly raise the level of abstraction, with mathematics being those where the object of abstraction is explained only in the world of logic (purely theoretical), and philosophy being those where the object is human thoughts and feelings that cannot be explained only by theory and logic.

What is concrete and what is abstract is not absolute, but is based on the relationship between each other. In other words, the term “concrete and abstract” itself is a concept that indicates “relative relationships,” not absolute concreteness or absolute abstraction.

For example, the word “onigiri” can be taken as an abstraction of “salmon onigiri” or “okaka onigiri,” or it can be taken as a concrete word for “food. In other words, the relationship of concrete to abstract can be continued indefinitely, as in “individual onigiri” → (abstraction) → “onigiri” → (abstraction) → “food.

Therefore, what Mr. A considers concrete may not be considered concrete at all by Mr. B. The opposite is also true.

For example, consider the conversation between boss A and subordinate B in a company.

Boss A: "Mr. B, it looks like the meeting guide I commented on the other day hasn't been fixed yet" 
Subordinate B: "Oh, that's right. I didn't understand the meaning of some of the comments, so they're still there. 
Boss A: "For example, where?"
Subordinate B: "It's a comment about stating the purpose of the meeting. I thought I had the purpose in mind. 
Boss A: "Is that the purpose of reviewing the development specifications?"
Subordinate B: "That's the intention, but" 
Boss A: "Isn't that just a means to an end? 
Subordinate B: "Because wasn't that the purpose of the meeting with all the development managers?"

The ends and means are all relative. A hierarchy is established in the form of multiple means for a single purpose, but a purpose always has a higher, more abstract “higher purpose.

In this case, subordinate B thinks that “reviewing” itself is the objective, while supervisor A, who thinks of “making investment decisions” as a higher objective, sees it as merely a means to an end.

In this way, the relationship between the “low abstraction” objective and the (high abstraction) “high level objective” appears to change depending on where you usually look. The reason for such misalignment and misunderstanding is that the scale of “concrete or abstract” is relative.

In this way, the concrete and the abstract are hierarchically structured. The hierarchical relationship between the concrete and the abstract is shown in the figure below, using the example of the fish.

This hierarchical structure of abstraction further increases the power of abstraction, as the properties of the higher levels are inherited by the lower levels. This property contributes greatly to the development of learning and knowledge.

Whether you are looking at events at the level of the concrete or whether you are thinking in terms of the connection between the concrete and the abstract can be clearly understood by, for example, asking someone to “briefly explain” a 500-page book.

If you ask a person who thinks at the concrete level to explain a 500-page book in three minutes, he or she will have no choice but to say, “I don’t have time, so I’ll just explain the first three chapters,” or “I’ll just extract the first part of each chapter. Similarly, if I were to ask you to extract ideas from 100 sticky notes and then summarize the results in 3 minutes, you would panic.

On the other hand, people who can talk abstractly can extract a “structure” from a huge amount of information and read some kind of “message” in response to the question “What is the point? Moreover, since they understand the “structure” and “message” at the level of abstraction, which consists of multiple layers, they can speak “in short” for one minute if it takes one minute, and “in short” for 30 minutes if it takes 30 minutes.

It is important for these, when confronted with a vast amount of information, to understand the content at various levels of abstraction. The ability of abstraction is especially useful in situations where you need to collect and analyze information that matches your purpose in a short time from the vast amount of information that is constantly flooding the Internet.

What is done there is to distinguish between the “trunk” and the “branches and leaves” according to the purpose of the situation, to grasp the main points, and to break them down to a thoroughly specific level only for the areas that are necessary.