Lexical Rules for Deverbal Adjectives

Lexical Rules for Deverbal Adjectives Victor Raskin 1 and Sergei Nirenburg Computing Research Laboratory New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM 88003 {raskin, sergei} @ crl. nmsu. edu Abstract. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also in- volves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics map- ping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper deals with the microtheory of adjectival semantics in one specific aspect, namely, the optimization and facilitation of the lexical entries for deverbal adjectives with the help:of lexical rules deriving such entries from those of the corresponding verbs. De- verbal adjectives turn out to be the largest single subclass in the adjective lexical category. Unlike scalar and relative adjectives, which are anchored in property and object concepts, respectively, in the underlying ontology, deverbal adjectives are based on process con- cepts. While acquisition with lexical rules is necessary, universal and efficient for the class of deverbal adjectives, our research shows that, often in spite of the strong appearance to the contrary, such acquisition is neither fully automatic nor cost-free. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task- oriented corpora. The findings are largely language-independent, and only English exam- ples are Used throughout the paper. 1. Introduction The general toPic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be includ- ed in a computational lexicon. Having addressed this general topic elsewhere (Raskin and Niren- burg 1995), we focus here on a more specific topic of the meaning of deverbal adjectives and, even more specifically, on the lexical rules used to derive the meanings of such adjectives from those of the corresponding verbs. An extensive literature review in Raskin and Nirenburg (1995: 3-20) has demonstrated a focus on a number of issues that the non-computational linguistics of adjectives has deemed important. These include adjective taxonomies, usually on the basis of more or less consistent external crite- ria, the dichotomy between predicating and non-predicating adjectives and the related dichotomy between qualitative and relative adjectives, the order of adjectives modifying the same noun, the degrees of comparison and scalability, and the substantivization of adjectives. We have shown also (Raskin and Nirenburg 1995: 24-27) that computational lexicography and computational semantics impose totally different parameters of relevance on these issues. We dis- covered that developing adjective semantics for an application modifies many popular views on the subject. It becomes clear, for instance, that • many adjectives do not modify semantically the nouns that they modify syntactically; • adjectival (attributive) meanings may be delivered by other parts of speech, and thus the se- 1 Also of Natural Language Processing Laboratory, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. 89 mantics of adjectives only partially reflects their possible syntactic distinctions; • the major distinction …

Content truncated to 500 words