Grounding gradable adjectives through crowdsourcing

Rebecca Sharp, Mithun Paul, Ajay Nagesh, Dane Bell, Mihai Surdeanu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

In order to build technology that has the ability to answer questions relevant to national and global security, e.g., on food insecurity in certain parts of the world, one has to implement machine reading technology that extracts causal mechanisms from texts. Unfortunately, many of these texts describe these interactions using vague, high-level language. One particular example is the use of gradable adjectives, i.e., adjectives that can take a range of magnitudes such as small or slight. Here we propose a method for estimating specific concrete groundings for a set of such gradable adjectives. We use crowdsourcing to gather human language intuitions about the impact of each adjective, then fit a linear mixed effects model to this data. The resulting model is able to estimate the impact of novel instances of these adjectives found in text. We evaluate our model in terms of its ability to generalize to unseen data and find that it has a predictive R 2 of 0.632 in general, and 0.677 on a subset of high-frequency adjectives.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationLREC 2018 - 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
EditorsHitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Stelios Piperidis, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Koiti Hasida, Helene Mazo, Khalid Choukri, Sara Goggi, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Nicoletta Calzolari, Jan Odijk, Takenobu Tokunaga
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages3348-3355
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9791095546009
StatePublished - 2019
Event11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2018 - Miyazaki, Japan
Duration: May 7 2018May 12 2018

Publication series

NameLREC 2018 - 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

Other

Other11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2018
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityMiyazaki
Period5/7/185/12/18

Keywords

  • Crowdsourcing
  • Gradable adjectives
  • Grounded semantics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Linguistics and Language
  • Education
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Language and Linguistics

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