Annotating Superlatives

An Empirical Approach to the Interpretation of Superlatives

In this paper we introduce an empirical approach to the semantic interpretation of superlative adjectives. We present a corpus annotated for superlatives and propose an interpretation algorithm that uses a wide-coverage parser and produces semantic representations. We achieve Fscores between 0.84 and 0.91 for detecting attributive superlatives and an accuracy in the range of 0.69–0.84 for deter...

Presuppositions in Superlatives

This paper discusses the distributive reading of plural superlatives. We argue that the compositional interpretation of plural superlative sentences requires that the referent of the superlative description is excluded from the comparison class associated with the degree morphology. We extend the claim to superlatives in general. The proposal implies that we need to rethink the presupposition c...

On the Attributive Nature of Superlatives

The standard view of superlatives treats them as a subkind of adjectives. However, in many languages, superlatives require the presence of a determiner, even in the predicate position. This leads to an apparent contradiction, since it is independently known that determiners syntactically combine with extended NP projections and are excluded with APs. This issue is resolved if superlative adject...

Comparative Superlatives in Relative Clauses

Towards a Computational Treatment of Superlatives

I propose a computational treatment of superlatives, starting with superlative constructions and the main challenges in automatically recognising and extracting their components. Initial experimental evidence is provided for the value of the proposed work for Question Answering. I also briefly discuss its potential value for Sentiment Detection and Opinion Extraction.