A Workshop on Restructuring Adjectives in WordNet

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The workshop gathers developers and users of lexical resources, corpus and computational linguists and researchers in natural language processing to discuss a targeted restructuring of the adjectives in the lexical database WordNet. Specific proposals for replacing a subset of the current clustering of adjectives around antonyms with ordered scales reflecting the relative intensity of dimensional adjectives, such as "big", "huge" and "gigantic", are presented along with preliminary work demonstrating the feasibility of corpus-based construction of scales by means of lexical-semantic patterns and their potential benefits for NLP. Discussion topics include (1) the principal benefits of encoding scalar properties for applications including word sense disambiguation, textual entailment and language pedagogy; (2) suitable corpora for extracting data for scale construction; (3) limitations of the recently-developed AdjScales method and alternative or complementary methods for extracting scalar properties; and (4) modeling of scalar adjectives in WordNet. Participants evaluate the proposed restructuring of adjectives for its feasibility, value and relevance to their own work and its potential for future research and applications. A report including the presentations, discussions and recommendations of the group will be prepared and freely disseminated via the WordNet website. The directions for targeted future developments of the widely used WordNet database as spelled out and agreed upon by representatives from a broad expert community assure significant consequences for research and applications in language technology and pedagogy. For a post-doctoral fellow and a graduate student the workshop provides a unique opportunity to interact with experts in the field.