A distributional study of negated adjectives and antonyms

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the relation between negated adjectives and antonyms in English using Distributional Semantics methods. Results show that, on the basis of contexts of use, a negated adjective (e.g., not cold) is typically more similar to the adjective itself (cold) than to its antonym (hot); such effect is less strong for antonyms derived by affixation (e.g., happy - unhappy)