In recent years, theoretical and computational linguistics has paid much attention to linguistic items that form scales. In NLP, much research has focused on ordering adjectives by intensity (tiny < small). Here, we address the task of automatically ordering English adverbs by their intensifying or diminishing effect on adjectives (e.g. extremely small < very small). We experiment with 4 differ...

We expose a method for extracting hyponyms and hypernyms from analytical definitions, focusing on the relation observed between hypernyms and relational adjectives (e.g., cardiovascular disease). These adjectives introduce a set of specialized features according to a categorization proper to a particular knowledge domain. For detecting these sequences of hypernyms associated to relational adjec...

The focus of the paper will be some aspects of the interaction of meaning and context with different kinds of adjectives. Adjective meanings are shown to be more constrained than was appreciated in earlier work. Facts about “NP-splitting” in Polish cast serious doubt on the standard hierarchy of adjectives, and the data become much more orderly if privative adjectives are reanalyzed as subsecti...

Associative adjectives such as in electrical engineer differ from ascriptive adjectives like in red house: They are syntactically similar, yet they do not denote an intersective sense like ascriptive adjectives do. However, associative adjectives may (irregularly) denote ascriptive traits connected to the associated entity: The more semanticallysimilar two entities are, the more regular the tra...

This paper describes a method for ranking a large list of adjectives according to a subjectivity score without resorting to any knowledge-intensive external resources (such as lexical databases, parsers or manual annotation). The method only requires a list of adjectives to be ranked and a small set of “seeds” (manually selected subjective adjectives). The subjectivity score is obtained by comp...

The interpretation of adjective-noun pairs plays a crucial role in tasks such as recognizing textual entailment. Formal semantics often places adjectives into a taxonomy which should dictate adjectives’ entailment behavior when placed in adjective-noun compounds. However, we show experimentally that the behavior of subsective adjectives (e.g. red) versus non-subsective adjectives (e.g. fake) is...

How is the meaning of an adjectivenoun phrase related to the meanings of its adjective and noun constituents? Different types of adjective produce different relations between a combination and in its constituent adjectives and nouns. Current theories give separate mechanisms for each adjective type. This paper shows how a computational model originally developed to explain classification in nou...

A series of studies was performed to investigate the effect of context upon evaluations made of personality-trait adjectives. Ss were presented sets of 3 adjectives which varied in favorableness as indicated by normative data and were then asked to evaluate 1 (test) adjective in each set under a variety of instructional conditions. Results indicated that whenever Ss were asked to rate the 3 adj...

In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY"). Study 2 revealed that this response occurred on...

This paper deals with the treatment of constructed neologisms in a machine translation system. It focuses on a particular issue in Romance languages: relational adjectives and the role they play in prefixation. Relational adjectives are formally adjectives but are semantically linked to their base-noun. In prefixation processes, the prefix is formally attached to the adjective, but its semantic...