tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: " It was provocative.” Learning the meaning of scalar adjectives"

Texts and dialogues often express information indirectly. For instance, speakers’ answers to yes/no questions do not always straightforwardly convey a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. The intended reply is clear in some cases (Was it good? It was great!) but uncertain in others (Was it acceptable? It was unprecedented.). In this paper, we present methods for interpreting the answers to questions like these which involve scalar modifiers. | Was it good It was provocative. Learning the meaning of scalar adjectives Marie-Catherine de Marneffe Christopher D. Manning and Christopher Potts Linguistics Department Stanford University Stanford CA 94305 mcdm manning cgpotts @ Abstract Texts and dialogues often express information indirectly. For instance speakers answers to yes no questions do not always straightforwardly convey a yes or no answer. The intended reply is clear in some cases Was it good It was great but uncertain in others Was it acceptable It was unprecedented. . In this paper we present methods for interpreting the answers to questions like these which involve scalar modifiers. We show how to ground scalar modifier meaning based on data collected from the Web. We learn scales between modifiers and infer the extent to which a given answer conveys yes or no . To evaluate the methods we collected examples of question-answer pairs involving scalar modifiers from CNN transcripts and the Dialog Act corpus and use response distributions from Mechanical Turk workers to assess the degree to which each answer conveys yes or no . Our experimental results closely match the Turkers response data demonstrating that meanings can be learned from Web data and that such meanings can drive pragmatic inference. 1 Introduction An important challenge for natural language processing is how to learn not only basic linguistic meanings but also how those meanings are systematically enriched when expressed in context. For instance answers to polar yes no questions do not always explicitly contain a yes or no but rather give information that the hearer can use to infer such an answer in a context with some degree of certainty. Hockey et al. 1997 find that 27 of answers to polar questions do not contain a direct yes or no word 44 of which they regard as failing to convey a clear yes or no response. In some cases interpreting the answer is straightforward Was it bad It was terrible. but in others what to infer