A Corpus-based Account of Regular Polysemy: The Case of Context-sensitive Adjectives

In this paper we investigate polysemous adjectives whose meaning varies depending on the nouns they modify (e.g., fast). We acquire the meanings of these adjectives from a large corpus and propose a probabilistic model which provides a ranking on the set of possible interpretations. We identify lexical semantic information automatically by exploiting the consistent correspondences between surface syntactic cues and lexical meaning. We evaluate our results against paraphrase judgments elicited experimentally from humans and show that the model's ranking of meanings correlates reliably with human intuitions: meanings that are found highly probable by the model are also rated as plausible by the subjects.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Maria Lapata
• Keywords: Lexical Semantic Information, Meaning Varies, NAACL 2001, NAACL 2007, Polysemous Adjectives