Ordering adverbs by their scaling effect on adjective intensity

Josef Ruppenhofer, Jasper Brandes, Petra Steiner, Michael Wiegand

Abstract:

In recent years, theoretical and computa-
tional linguistics has paid much attention
to linguistic items that form scales. In
NLP, much research has focused on order-
ing adjectives by intensity (tiny < small).
Here, we address the task of automatically
ordering English adverbs by their intensi-
fying or diminishing effect on adjectives
(e.g. extremely small < very small).
We experiment with 4 different methods:
1) using the association strength be-
tween adverbs and adjectives; 2) exploit-
ing scalar patterns (such as not only X but
Y); 3) using the metadata of product re-
views; 4) clustering. The method that per-
forms best is based on the use of metadata
and ranks adverbs by their scaling factor
relative to unmodified adjectives.