Classification of adjectival and non-adjectival nouns based on their semantic behavior by using a self-organizing semantic map

Abstract

We treat nouns that behave adjectively, which we call adjectival nouns, extracted from large corpora. For example, in and world of finance, financial and finance are different parts of speech, but their semantic behaviors are similar to each other. We investigate how adjectival nouns are similar to adjectives and different from non-adjectival nouns by using self-organizing semantic maps. We create five kinds of semantic maps, i.e., semantic maps of abstract nouns organized via (1) adjectives, (2) adjectival nouns, (3) non-adjectival nouns and (4) adjectival and adjectival nouns and a semantic map of adjectives, adjectival nouns and non-adjectival nouns organized via collocated abstract nouns, and compare them with each other to find similarities and differences.