Yesterday in Reggio Emilia: invited talk on visual abstraction @abstractionerc.bsky.social at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (study day on visual & multimodal metaphor, MANIS/CIRM).
Great discussions and wonderful colleagues, thanks to the organizers!
Group pic by Annamaria 👇
Our paper "Cognitive Efficiency and Perceived Text Quality in Children: how Concreteness and Specificity shape Clarity and Informativeness" has been accepted at #CogSci 2026 in Rio de Janeiro!
cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2026/
#wordladders player feels philosophical, ending their abstraction ladder with the inevitable truth "everything is a thing" 😍
Download Word Ladders and play now:
Android 👉 shorturl.at/kqAOS
Apple 👉 shorturl.at/buIS2
📢 Diego Frassinelli’s seminar for @abstractionerc.bsky.social is now online.
An excellent opportunity to revisit the talk FROM BANANAS TO JUSTICE: MODELLING ABSTRACTNESS ACROSS TEXT AND IMAGES.
🔗 Watch the seminar here: site.unibo.it/abstraction/...
Join us at today's seminar on abstractness, figurative meaning and multimodality with Diego Frassinelli.
📣 13 February 2026, 10:30 (Rome time, UTC+1)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or
💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/dBI5L)
👉 Seminar will be recorded and shared later
✨
📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 13 February 2026, 10:30 (Rome time, UTC+1)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or
💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/dBI5L)
🎆 Join us for another seminar, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social
#WordLadder of the day.
Peeking into the backend of the Word Ladder mobile app 👀
This is an example of the power of linguistic compositionality 😅
(Note that #LLMs tend play Word Ladders exactly like this user, we found).
But where do we draw the line between a legit hyponym and a non-legit one?
#WordLadder 🎮 of the day. 👀
Is it legit to list "metal" a subtype of "rock" music? 🎶
Or are rock and metal music co-hyponyms, on the same level but different styles? 🤔
Another #WordLadders pearl: this is the ladder of abstraction created by a creative user 😇 , starting from prompt word 🍎 APPLE (remember the rules: climbing up the ladder words are increasingly more general, strolling down are increasingly more specific:
here's another folksonomy from Word Ladders data: a FOX classified as a type of FELINE. Apparently this is a very common misconception, at least in #WordLadders data.
Download Word Ladders and play now:
Android 👉 shorturl.at/kqAOS
Apple 👉 shorturl.at/buIS2
🎥 Yesterday’s seminar by @kristinadespot.bsky.social is now online: "Metaphor literalization strategies: from concrete to abstract and back to concrete again".
The recording is available on the Abstraction website.
👉 Watch it here: site.unibo.it/abstraction/...
Have a joyful break!
Do cross-sensory metaphors drive consumers' appreciation in print advertising? Visuals or linguistic expressions?
Check it out!
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
here another example, in English 👇
given the word CUP, a more general is CONTAINER (correct: a CUP is a type of CONTAINER), and a more specific is indicated as HANDLE. But a handle is NOT a type of CUP!
1/2 posts
#WordLadders data, peaking into the backoffice of the app.
SO MANY abstraction ladders in which meronymy is confused with hyponymy! "seed" as a suptype of "apple", a classic :-) This suggests that hierarchical semantic relations in our minds are not very stable and clear. How about #LLMs?
Have a joyful and well-deserved winter break, y'all!
From us at @abstractionerc.bsky.social
Word Ladders is a free mobile app developed by @Abstraction_ERC to collect linguistic data
site.unibo.it/abstraction/en
Join more than 3400 players to help us study the role of language in Abstraction.
Download:
Android 👉 shorturl.at/kqAOS
Apple 👉 shorturl.at/buIS2
Word Ladders is a free mobile app developed by @Abstraction_ERC to collect linguistic data
site.unibo.it/abstraction/en
Join more than 3400 players to help us study the role of language in Abstraction.
Download:
Android 👉 shorturl.at/kqAOS
Apple 👉 shorturl.at/buIS2
Being literal using metaphor. Literalization as a process to cooperatively delve into language use and its consequences, during psychotherapy sessions.
@abstractionerc.bsky.social
@kristinadespot.bsky.social
Our ritual picture during lunch break 😎:
Team @abstractionerc.bsky.social and the invited speaker @kristinadespot.bsky.social discussing metaphors around the table!
@mariannabolog.bsky.social @caterinavillani.bsky.social @lauraocchipinti.bsky.social
@paolavernillo
Spending time with @abstractionerc.bsky.social Team is always nourishing — intellectually during the talk, and physically right after, as this photo reveals.
Metaphor literalization strategies, a seminar by @kristinadespot.bsky.social joint organized with colleagues from the Metaphor Lab, connected from remote.
@kristinadespot.bsky.social on the truthfulness of metaphor in conceptual metaphor theory
@abstractionerc.bsky.social
Setting up the room for @abstractionerc.bsky.social seminar with speaker prof. @kristinadespot.bsky.social on Metaphor literalization strategy: from concrete to abstract and back to concrete again. Join us at 10.30, Rome time!
💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/B4H7R)
A recording will be available
Say hi to the IconicITA dataset!
We introduce iconicity ratings for Italian produced by L1 and L2 speakers, and show how iconicity relates to key psycholinguistic variables and chronometric data.
Note: Specificity emerges as a good predictor of iconicity! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
New theoretical paper: “Beyond concreteness: why word specificity is the missing piece in theories on embodied language comprehension”
shorturl.at/6Rv3Y
Included in the special issue
"Rethinking the Embodiment of Language: Challenges and Future Horizons", led by V. Cuccio, V. Gallese & Y. Shtyrov.
📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 12 December, 10:30 (CET)
🎙️Prof.ssa Kristina S. Despot
🎓Metaphor literalization strategy: From concrete to abstract and back to concrete again
📍 Bologna
💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/B4H7R)
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
✨@abstractionerc.bsky.social
🌐 Il seminario della collega Valentina Cuccio è ora online!
È disponibile sul sito di Abstraction al link: site.unibo.it/abstraction/...
Se vi siete persi l’incontro o volete riascoltarlo con calma, potete trovarlo lì. Buona visione! 🎧✨
E oggi ho condiviso con il centro interdipartimentale Alma AI e un gruppo di colleghe e colleghi giuristi capitanati da Monica Palmirani i risultati a grandi linee del gruppo @abstractionerc.bsky.social su studi che coinvolgono l'uso di LLMs. Questa settimana è decisamente densa :-)
Seeing this slide after completing my postdoc at @abstractionerc.bsky.social makes me emotional. Great talk of @mariannabolog.bsky.social at the workshop "Large and Small Language Models: stato dell’arte fra limiti e prospettive" at Unibo. Many works about abstraction and LLM are on the horizon! :)