Exploring Supervised LDA Models for Assigning Attributes to Adjective-Noun Phrases

This paper introduces an attribute selection task as a way to characterize the inherent meaning of property-denoting adjectives in adjective-noun phrases, such as e.g. hot in hot summer denoting the attribute TEMPERATURE, rather than TASTE. We formulate this task in a vector space model that represents adjectives and nouns as vectors in a semantic space defined over possible attributes. The vectors incorporate latent semantic information obtained from two variants of LDA topic models. Our LDA models outperform previous approaches on a small set of 10 attributes with considerable gains on sparse representations, which highlights the strong smoothing power of LDA models. For the first time, we extend the attribute selection task to a new data set with more than 200 classes. We observe that large-scale attribute selection is a hard problem, but a subset of attributes performs robustly on the large scale as well. Again, the LDA models outperform the VSM baseline.