Computational treatment of superlatives
The use of gradable adjectives and adverbs represents an important means of expressing comparison in English. The grammatical forms of comparatives and superlatives are used to express explicit orderings between objects with respect to the degree to which they possess some gradable property. While comparatives are commonly used to compare two entities (e.g., âThe blue whale is larger than an African elephantâ), superlatives such as âThe blue whale is the largest mammalâ are used to express a comparison between a target entity (here, the blue whale) and its comparison set (the set of mammals), with the target ranked higher or lower on a scale of comparison than members of the comparison set. Superlatives thus highlight the uniqueness of the target with respect to its comparison set. Although superlatives are frequently found in natural language, with the exception of recent work by (Bos and Nissim, 2006) and (Jindal and Liu, 2006b), they have not yet been investigated within a computational framework. And within the framework of theoretical linguistics, studies of superlatives have mainly focused on semantic properties that may only rarely occur in natural language (Szabolsci (1986), Heim (1999)). My
Scheible, Silke
adjectives ; adverbs ; gradable property ; superlatives ; ISA superlatives ; NLP applications ; Superlative Relation Extractor ; Opinion Mining
Computational treatment of superlatives. The use of gradable adjectives and adverbs represents an important means of expressing comparison in English. The grammatical forms of comparatives and superlatives are used to express explicit orderings between objects with respect to the degree to which they possess some gradable property. While comparatives are commonly used to compare two entities (e.g., âThe blue whale is larger than an African elephantâ), superlatives such as âThe blue whale is the largest mammalâ are used to express a comparison between a target entity (here, the blue whale) and its comparison set (the set of mammals), with the target ranked higher or lower on a scale of comparison than members of the comparison set. Superlatives thus highlight the uniqueness of the target with respect to its comparison set. Although superlatives are frequently found in natural language, with the exception of recent work by (Bos and Nissim, 2006) and (Jindal and Liu, 2006b), they have not yet been investigated within a computational framework. And within the framework of theoretical linguistics, studies of superlatives have mainly focused on semantic properties that may only rarely occur in natural language (Szabolsci (1986), Heim (1999)). My
computational treatment use gradable adjective adverbs represent important mean express comparison_english grammatical form use_express explicit ordering object respect degree posse gradable property comparative commonly_use compare two_entity blue whale large african elephant blue whale large mammal use_express comparison target entity blue whale comparison set set mammal target rank high_low scale comparison member comparison set thus highlight uniqueness target respect comparison set although frequently find natural_language exception recent_work bos yet investigate within computational framework within_framework theoretical_linguistics study mainly focused semantic_property may rarely occur natural_language