A Language-independent Model for Introducing a New Semantic Relation Between Adjectives and Nouns in a WordNet

The aim of this paper is to show a language-independent process of creating a new semantic relation between adjectives and nouns in wordnets. The existence of such a relation is expected to improve the detection of figurative language and sentiment analysis (SA). The proposed method uses an annotated corpus to explore the semantic knowledge contained in linguistic constructs performing as the rhetorical figure Simile. Based on the frequency of occurrence of similes in an annotated corpus, we propose a new relation, which connects the noun synset with the synset of an adjective representing that noun’s specific attribute. We elaborate on adding this new relation in the case of the Serbian WordNet (SWN). The proposed method is evaluated by human judgement in order to determine the relevance of automatically selected relation items. The evaluation has shown that 84% of the automatically selected and the most frequent linguistic constructs, whose frequency threshold was equal to 3, were also selected by humans.