Semantic orientation (SO) for texts is often determined on the basis of the positive or negative polarity, or sentiment, found in the text. Polarity is typically extracted using the positive and negative words in the text, with a particular focus on adjectives, since they convey a high degree of opinion. Not all adjectives are created equal, however. Adjectives found in certain parts of the tex...

WordNet divides adjectives in descriptives and relationals basically and they are represented in an enumerative way. The category was not introduced in EuroWordNet and Spanish adjectives in the SpanishWordNet are the translation of the English synsets. This paper describes a proposal of organizing and incorporating adjectives into the SpanishWordNet in terms of representing its polymorphic beha...

An expression is vague, if its meaning is not precise. For vagueness at the sentence-level this means that a vague sentence does not give rise to precise truth conditions. This is a problem for the standard theory of meaning within linguistics, because this theory presupposes that each sentence has a precise meaning with respect to each context of use. The philosophical discussion on ‘vagueness...

This paper is devoted to a particular aspect of the interpretation of evaluative adjectives (marvelous, horrible), that is, adjectives that are compatible with subjective attitude verbs like find in the construction find x adj (e.g. find marvelous) and give rise to the so-called ‘faultless disagreement’ pattern. 1 Evaluative adjectives have often been claimed to manifest a strong, and even excl...

Introduction Property adjectives such as green, round, or old define a property of their argument; when combined with a noun, the property is attributed to the referent of the noun. Adjectives of this sort can be thought to define classes in their own right, such as the green ones or the round ones. Relational or classificatory adjectives, such as nuclear, dental, or musical, in contrast, do no...

This paper investigates a little-studied class of adjectives that we refer to as ‘complex adjectives’, i.e., operationally, adjectives constituted of at least two word tokens separated by a hyphen. We study the properties of these adjectives using two very large text collections: a portion of Wikipedia and a Web corpus. We consider three corpus-based measures of morphological productivity, and ...

Gradable adjectives are inherently vague and are used by clinicians to document medical interpretations (e.g., severe reaction, mild symptoms). We present a comprehensive study of gradable adjectives used in the clinical domain. We automatically identify gradable adjectives and demonstrate that they have a substantial presence in clinical text. Further, we show that there is a specific pattern ...

The literature on predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has focused on a surprisingly limited range of expressions. This narrow focus has led to problematic theoretical conclusions about the syntax and semantics. I argue that PPTs are an instance of a more interesting general category of (what I call) evaluational predicates. Like other gradable adjectives, PPTs are sensitive to a relevant degree...

This paper proposes an innovative approach to improve the classification performance of Persian texts. The proposed method uses a thesaurus as a helpful knowledge to obtain more representative word-frequencies in the corpus. Two types of word relationships are considered in our used thesaurus. This is the first attempt to use a Persian thesaurus in the field of Persian information retrieval. Ex...