tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "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. | Towards a Computational Treatment of Superlatives Silke Scheible Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems ICCS School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Abstract 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. 1 Introduction Although superlatives are frequently found in natural language with the exception of recent work by Bos and Nissim 2006 and Jindal and Liu 2006 they have not yet been investigated within a computational framework. And within the framework of theoretical linguistics studies of superlatives have mainly focused on particular semantic properties that may only rarely occur in natural language Szabolcsi 1986 Heim 1999 . My goal is a comprehensive computational treatment of superlatives. The initial question I address is how useful information can be automatically extracted from superlative constructions. Due to the great semantic complexity and the variety of syntactic structures in which superlatives occur this is a major challenge. However meeting it will benefit NLP applications such as Question Answering Sentiment Detection and Opinion Extraction and Ontology Learning. 2 What are Superlatives In linguistics the term superlative describes a well-defined class of word forms which in Eng lish are derived from adjectives or adverbs in two different ways Inflectionally where the suffix -est is appended to the base form of the adjective or adverb . lowest nicest smartest or analytically where the base adjective adverb is preceded by the markers most least . most interesting least beautiful . Certain adjectives and adverbs have irregular superlative forms good best bad worst far furthest .