# A Grounded Typology of Word Classes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10369/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08295/) (2024)
- [PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07726/) (2024)
- [How to Compute the Probability of a Word](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14561/) (2024)
- [Leading Whitespaces of Language Models' Subword Vocabulary Pose a Confound for Calculating Word Probabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10851/) (2024)
- [Semantic and Expressive Variation in Image Captions Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14356/) (2023)
- [Cross-Lingual and Cross-Cultural Variation in Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16646/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Is Information Density Uniform when Utterances are Grounded on Perception and Discourse?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14653/) (2026)
- [Looking to Learn: Token-wise Dynamic Gating for Low-Resource Vision-Language Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08470/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a grounded approach to meaning in language typology. We treat data from perceptual modalities, such as images, as a language-agnostic representation of meaning. Hence, we can quantify the function--form relationship between images and captions across languages. Inspired by information theory, we define "groundedness", an empirical measure of contextual semantic contentfulness (formulated as a difference in surprisal) which can be computed with multilingual multimodal language models. As a proof of concept, we apply this measure to the typology of word classes. Our measure captures the contentfulness asymmetry between functional (grammatical) and lexical (content) classes across languages, but contradicts the view that functional classes do not convey content. Moreover, we find universal trends in the hierarchy of groundedness (e.g., nouns > adjectives > verbs), and show that our measure partly correlates with psycholinguistic concreteness norms in English. We release a dataset of groundedness scores for 30 languages. Our results suggest that the grounded typology approach can provide quantitative evidence about semantic function in language.