We present the Database of Catalan Adjectives (DCA), a database with 2,296 adjective lemmata enriched with morphological, syntactic and semantic information. This set of adjectives has been collected from a fragment of the Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans and constitutes a representative sample of the adjective class in Catalan as a whole. T...

In this paper we propose a small set of lexical conceptual relations which allow to encode adjectives in computational relational lexica in a principled and integrated way. Our main motivation comes from the fact that adjectives and certain classes of verbs, related in a way or another with adjectives, do not have a satisfactory representation in this kind of lexica. This is due to a great exte...

This paper focuses on a particular type of abusive language, targeting expressions in which typically neutral adjectives take on pejorative meaning when used as nouns compare gay people to the gays. We first collect and analyze a corpus of hand-curated, expert-annotated pejorative nominalizations for four target adjectives: female, gay, illegal, and poor. We then collect a second corpus of auto...

The present paper addresses the question how in syntactic parsing the coverage of words in previously unseen text may be improved. The adjectives in English are presented here as a case study. Working on the assumption that most new words that are introduced into the language are constructed on the basis of already existing words through the application of word-formation processes, we investiga...

Three experiments examined the conditions under which infants acquiring English succeed in mapping novel adjectives, applied ostensively to individual objects, to other objects with the same property (color or texture). Twenty-one-month-old infants were introduced to a target (e.g., a yellow object) and asked to choose between (1) a matching test object (e.g., a different yellow object) and (2)...

The need to distinguish two syntactic sources for adnominal adjectives (a direct modification and a relative clause one), with the associated interpretive properties, turns out to have certain implications for the semantic classification of adjectives. We will see that it provides evidence for the existence of a class of truly privative adjectives, and for the conclusion that subsective adjecti...

In this paper we discuss the semantics of adjectives from the perspective of a Modern Type Theory (MTT) with an adequate subtyping mechanism. In an MTT, common nouns (CNs) can be interpreted as types and, in particular, CNs modified by intersective and subsective adjectives can be given semantics by means of Σ-types. However, an interpretation of CNs as types would not be viable without a prope...

Adjectives are one of the major contributors to conveying subjective meaning to sentences. Understanding the semantics of adjectives is essential for understanding natural language sentences. In this paper we propose a novel approach for learning different properties that an adjective can describe, corresponding to the ‘attribute concepts’, which is not currently available in existing linguisti...

In the paper we analyse Polish descriptive adjectives which occur in domain related texts. The experiments were done on data obtained from hospital discharge records. Prenominal adjectives selected from these texts were filtered out of presumably relative adjectives and clustered on the basis of a set of context related features and interword relations derived from Wordnet. We tested if this pr...