Learning Scalar Adjective Intensity from Paraphrases
Anne Cocos, Veronica Wharton, Ellie Pavlick, Marianna Apidianaki, Chris Callison-Burch · 2018
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 paraphrasebased 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 ↔ scalding suggests that hot < 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.