Detecting and ordering adjectival scalemates

This paper presents a pattern-based method that can be used to infer adjectival scales, such as , from a corpus. Specifically, the proposed method uses lexical patterns to automatically identify and order pairs of scalemates, followed by a filtering phase in which unrelated pairs are discarded. For the filtering phase, several different similarity measures are implemented and compared. The model presented in this paper is evaluated using the current standard, along with a novel evaluation set, and shown to be at least as good as the current state-of-the-art.Comment: Paper presented at MAPLEX 2015, February 9-10, Yamagata, Japan (http://lang.cs.tut.ac.jp/maplex2015/

Retrieval from memory: Vulnerable or inviolable?

We show that retrieval from semantic memory is vulnerable even to the mere presence of speech. Irrelevant speech impairs semantic fluency—namely, lexical retrieval cued by a semantic category name—but only if it is meaningful (forward speech compared to reversed speech or words compared to nonwords). Moreover, speech related semantically to the retrieval category is more disruptive than unrelated speech. That phonemic fluency—in which participants are cued with the first letter of words they are to report—was not disrupted by the mere presence of meaningful speech, only by speech in a related phonemic category, suggests that distraction is not mediated by executive processing load. The pattern of sensitivity to different properties of sound as a function of the type of retrieval cue is in line with an interference-by-process approach to auditory distraction

A plea for more interactions between psycholinguistics and natural language processing research

A new development in psycholinguistics is the use of regression analyses on tens of thousands of words, known as the megastudy approach. This development has led to the collection of processing times and subjective ratings (of age of acquisition, concreteness, valence, and arousal) for most of the existing words in English and Dutch. In addition, a crowdsourcing study in the Dutch language has resulted in information about how well 52,000 lemmas are known. This information is likely to be of interest to NLP researchers and computational linguists. At the same time, large-scale measures of word characteristics developed in the latter traditions are likely to be pivotal in bringing the megastudy approach to the next level

Antonyms as lexical constructions: or, why paradigmatic construction is not an oxymoron

This paper argues that antonymy is a syntagmatic as well as a paradigmatic relation, and that antonym pairs constitute a particular type of construction. This position relies on three observations about antonymy in discourse: (1) antonyms tend to co-occur in sentences, (2) they tend to co-occur in particular contrastive constructions, and (3) unlike other paradigmatic relations, antonymy is lexical as well as semantic in nature. CxG offers a means to treat both the contrastive constructions and conventionalised antonym pairings as linguistic constructions, thus providing an account of how semantically paradigmatic relations come to be syntagmatically realised as well. After reviewing the relevant characteristics of CxG, it looks at some of the phrasal contexts in which antonyms tend to co-occur and argues that at least some of these constitute constructions with contrastive import. It then sketches a new type of discontinuous lexical construction that treats antonym pairs as lexical items, and raises issues for further discussion