Dead parrots make bad pets: Exploring modifier effects in noun phrases

Sometimes modifiers have a strong effect on core aspects of the meaning of the nouns they are attached to: A parrot is a desirable pet, but a dead parrot is, at the very least, a rather unusual household companion. In order to stimulate computational research into the impact of modification on phrase meaning, we collected and made available a large dataset containing subject ratings for a variety of noun phrases and the categories they might belong to. We propose to use compositional distributional semantics to model these data, experimenting with numerous distributional semantic spaces, phrase composition methods and asymmetric similarity measures. Our models capture a statistically significant portion of the data, although much work is still needed before we achieve a full computational account of modification effects.