Knowing the degree of antonymy between words has widespread applications in natural language processing. Manually-created lexicons have limited coverage and do not include most semantically contrasting word pairs. We present a new automatic and empirical measure of antonymy that combines corpus statistics with the structure of a published thesaurus. The approach is evaluated on a set of closest...

Metric systems for semantics, or semantic cognitive maps, are allocations of words or other representations in a metric space based on their meaning. Existing methods for semantic mapping, such as Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, are based on paradigms involving dissimilarity metrics. They typically do not take into account relations of antonymy and yield a large number...

This paper uses Esperanto—a constructed language with transparent morphology but rich semantic-pragmatic components—to study antonymy and polarity. We investigate the distribution of the Esperanto antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’ (as in, for instance, ‘mal-alta’: antonym-tall, short) in a 4.3 million-word corpus, Tekstaro, and use it as an empirical basis to assess different theories of negative antony...

A revised model for the description of verbs in plWordNet a large wordnet of Polish is presented in the paper. The model has originated from the previous one (the versions 2.0 and 3.0) as a combination of simplifications and expansions. The simplifications were motivated by the collected experience of the previous model implementation for almost 18 thousand Polish verbs. The proposed expansions...

The word “antonymy” was coined in 1867 by CJ Smith to describe word-pairs commonly known as “opposites” such as hot/cold, girl/boy and buy/sell. Some linguists (e.g. Lyons (1977) and Cruse (1986)) apply the term “antonymy” restrictively and would only identify the first of these three pairs as being truly antonymous. However, this seems counter-intuitive in many respects, and this paper will us...

In this paper we report on experiments to determine if antonymy is a good predictor of contrast, using 124 texts from the British National Corpus and the antonymy relations for adjectives recognized by WordNet. Further, we considered whether antonyms are key arguments in the inferences that license contrast. We looked at the frequency of both indirect and direct antonym pairs in contrastive sen...

The goal of this paper is to characterize and account for the systematic distribution of a semantic property, “evaluativity”. A construction is evaluative if it makes reference to a degree that exceeds a contextually specified standard. The term comes from Neeleman et al. (2004); Seuren (1978) alternatively refers to this property as ‘orientedness’ and Bierwisch (1989) as ‘norm-relatedness’. Th...

For meaning representations in NLP, we focus our attention on thematic aspects and conceptual vectors. The learning strategy of conceptual vectors relies on a morphosyntaxic analysis of human usage dictionary definitions linked to vector propagation. This analysis currently doesn’t take into account negation phenomena. This work aims at studying the antonymy aspects of negation, in the larger g...