Implementing WordNet for Swedish adjectives

A Swedish version of WordNet was created and around 300 Swedish adjectives, mainly from the semantic field of strength, were implemented. This paper is a documentation of the implementation. The purpose of the study was to investigate the possibilities of applying WordNet to Swedish and to illuminate general problems with WordNet as well as specific problems in the handling of adjectives. First, a short overview of WordNet is given, and then the WordNet categorisation of adjectives is reviewed. The section about the implementation gives hands-on knowledge of how to add a new adjectival lexical entry in WordNet. Then a description of the problems encountered and some general remarks follow

What a corpus-based dictionary tells us about antonymy

This paper investigates the treatment of antonymy in Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (2003) in order to find out what kinds of headwords are provided with antonyms as part of their definitions and also discusses the principles for antonym inclusion in the entries. CCALED includes canonical antonyms such as good/bad and dead/alive, as well as more contextually restricted pairings such as hot/mild and flat/fizzy. The vast majority of the antonymic pairings in the dictionary are adjectives. Most of the antonyms are morphologically different from the headwords they define and typically do not involve antonymic affixes such as non-, un- or -less. Only just over one-third of the total number of pairs are given in both directions. The principles for when antonyms are included in CCALED are not transparent to us

Statistics for sentential co-occurrence

There is a growing trend in linguistics to use large corpora as a tool in the study of language. Through the investigation of the different contexts a word occurs in, it is possible to gain insight in the meanings associated with the word. Concordances are commonly used as a tool in lexicography, but while the study of concordances is fruitful it is also tedious, so statistical methods are gaining grounds in corpus linguistics. Several statistical measures have been introduced to measure the strength in association between two words, e.g. t-score (Barnbrook 1996:97-98), mutual information, MI (Charniak 1993; McEnery & Wilson 1996; Oakes 1998) and Berry-Rogghe’s z-score (1973). Those measures are designed to measure the strength of association between words occurring at a close distance from each other, i.e. immediately next to each other or within a fixed window span. Research that uses the sentence as a linguistic unit of study has also been presented. For example, antonymous concepts have been shown to co-occur in the same sentence more often than chance predicts by Justeson & Katz 1991, 1992 and Fellbaum 1995. A problem using the sentence as unit of study is that the lengths of the sentences vary from sentence to sentence. This has an impact on the statistical calculation – it is more likely to find two given words in a long sentence than in a short one. The probability of finding two given words co-occurring in the same sentence is thus affected. We introduce an exact expression for the calculation of the expected number of sentential co-occurrences. The p-value is calculated assuming that the number of random co-occurrences follows a Poisson distribution. A formal proof justifying this approximation is provided in the appendix. Apart from the statistical methods that account for the variation in sentence length, a case study is presented as an application of the statistical method. The study replicates Justeson and Katz’s 1991 study that shows that English antonyms co-occur sententially more frequently than chance predicts. The results of our study show that the variation in sentence length causes the chance for co-occurrence of two given words to increase. However, the main finding of Justeson & Katz is reinforced: antonyms co-occur significantly more often in the same sentence than expected by chance

Antonymy and negation: the boundedness hypothesis

This paper investigates the interpretation of unbounded (scalar) adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) narrow – (not) wide and bounded adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) dead – (not) alive as well as their interpretations with approximating degree modifiers, fairly and almost, respectively. The investigation was designed to test the boundedness hypothesis, namely that the negator is sensitive to the configuration of the adjective in terms of BOUNDEDNESS. The data are Swedish and the results of the experiments show that negated unbounded adjectives do not evoke the interpretation of their antonyms, i.e. not wide does not equal ‘narrow’. The results of the experiments with bounded adjectives with and without negation showed that some of the negated adjectives were interpreted as synonyms of their antonyms, i.e. not alive equals ‘dead’. However, this pattern was not consistent across the bounded adjectives, since a number of them readily lent themselves to partial readings. Four types of bounded antonyms emerged from the participants’ judgements. For both unbounded and bounded adjectives, the interpretations of the approximating degree modifiers and the adjectives were not significantly different from the negated adjectives

Selecting antonyms for dictionary entries: methodological aspects

This paper investigates the treatment of antonymy in Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (2003) in order to find out what kinds of headwords are provided with antonyms as part of their definitions and also discusses the principles for antonym inclusion in the entries. CCALED includes canonical antonyms such as good/bad and dead/alive, as well as more contextually restricted pairings such as hot/mild and flat/fizzy. The vast majority of the antonymic pairings in the dictionary are adjectives. Most of the antonyms are morphologically different from the headwords they define and typically do not involve antonymic affixes such as non-, un- or -less. Only just over one-third of the total number of pairs is given in both directions. The principles for when antonyms are included in CCALED are not transparent to us. We propose a corpus-based method to support decisions about antonym selection and inclusion

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

This study has two goals: Firstly, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse, and secondly, based on these finding, and previous work on antonymic meanings, contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the same contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous work, but also otherwise. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e. attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as ‘basic’, metaphorical or metonymical. Multi-dimensional correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarity spaces on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity – and some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue