xcit'ed

Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou and Kathleen McKeown Toward the Automatic Identification of Adjectival Scales: Clustering Adjectives According to Meaning In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 172--182, Columbus, Ohio. 1993.

In this paper we present a method to group adjectives according to their meaning, as a first step towards the automatic identification of adjectival scales. We discuss the properties of adjectival scales and of groups of semantically related adjectives and how they imply sources of linguistic knowledge in text corpora. We describe how our system exploits this linguistic knowledge to compute a measure of similarity between two adjectives, using statistical techniques and without having access to any semantic information about the adjectives. We also show how a clustering algorithm can use these similarities to produce the groups of adjectives, and we present results produced by our system for a sample set of adjectives. We conclude by presenting evaluation methods for the task at hand, and analyzing the significance of the results obtained.

Semantic relatedness subsumes hyponymy, synonymy, and antonymyincompatibility. automatically grouping adjectives according to their meaning adjective - nouns adjectives describing the same property tend to modify approximately the same set of nouns.