Learning Scalar Adjective Intensity from Paraphrases
Adjectives like {``}warm{''}, {``}hot{''}, and {``}scalding{''} all describe temperature but differ in intensity. Understanding these differences between adjectives is a necessary part of reasoning about natural language. We propose a new paraphrase-based method to automatically learn the relative intensity relation that holds between a pair of scalar adjectives. Our approach analyzes over 36k adjectival pairs from the Paraphrase Database under the assumption that, for example, paraphrase pair {``}really hot{''} {\textless}{--}{\textgreater} {``}scalding{''} suggests that {``}hot{''} {\textless} {``}scalding{''}. We show that combining this paraphrase evidence with existing, complementary pattern- and lexicon-based approaches improves the quality of systems for automatically ordering sets of scalar adjectives and inferring the polarity of indirect answers to {``}yes/no{''} questions.
PDF Abstract
