Ambiguous Adjectives Research Articles

Zero-derivation in Korean: the effect of covert structure in real-time processing.

Korean words like balgda 'bright/become bright' and gilda 'long/become long' are categorially ambiguous; they can appear as both adjectives and verbs. Some suggest that these words are listed under separate lexical entries, while others propose that they share one single lexical entry, and that the verb form is morphologically derived from the base adjective through a process called zero derivation. This study presents the results of a real-time experiment that investigates whether these words involve zero derivation and if so, how zero derivation may affect the real-time processing of these words. Our findings suggest that the reader recognizes the base adjective and obtains the derived-verb form by virtue of adding a covert category-changing morpheme in real-time sentence processing. This study provides promising evidence of the zero derivation of Korean categorially ambiguous adjectives and verbs, as well as crosslinguistic evidence of the role of covert structure in lexical access.

Adjectives and adverbs as stylometric analysis parameters

The present study considers the role of adjectives and adverbs in stylometric analysis and authorship attribution. Adjectives and adverbs allow both for variations in placement and order (adverbs) and variations in type (adjectives). This preliminary study examines a collection of 25 English-language blogs taken from the Schler Blog corpus, and the Project Gutenberg corpus with specific emphasis on 3 works. Within the blog corpora, the first and last 100 lines were extracted for the purpose of analysis. Project Gutenberg corpora were used in full. All texts were processed and part-of-speech tagged using the Python NLTK package. All adverbs were classified as sentence-initial, preverbal, interverbal, postverbal, sentence-final, or none-of-the-above. The adjectives were classified into types according to the universal English type hierarchy (Cambridge Dictionary Online, 2021; Annear, 1964) manually by one of the authors. Ambiguous adjectives were classified according to their context. For the adverbs, the initial samples were paired and used as training data to attribute the final samples. This resulted in 600 trials under each of five experimental conditions. We were able to attribute authorship with an average accuracy of 9.7% greater than chance across all five conditions. Confirmatory experiments are ongoing with a larger sample of English-language blogs. This strongly suggests that adverbial placement is a useful and novel idiolectal variable for authorship attribution (Juola et al., 2021). For the adjective, differences were found in the type of adjective used by each author. Percent use of each type varied based upon individual preference and subject-matter (e.g. Moby Dick had a large number of adjectives related to size and color). While adverbial order and placement are highly variable, adjectives are subject to rigid restrictions that are not violated across texts and authors. Stylometric differences in adjective use generally involve the type and category of adjectives preferred by the author. Future investigation will focus, likewise, on whether adverbial variation is similarly analyzable by type and category of adverb.

The hype in spectral imaging

Author Summary: Hyperspectral imaging is currently a very well-known and much used technology for measuring features in different fields, such as chemistry, geology, medicine, food and agriculture, either spaceborne (satellites), airborne (drones) or at close proximity (e.g. field scanning, industrial sorting lines or microscopy). Its background is two-fold, and it can be considered as a special case of spectroscopy (“imaging spectroscopy”) or a special case of imaging (“spectral imaging”). Current practice is to use adjectives such as multi and hyper added to “spectral imaging” in order to characterise the number of wavelength bands. In this paper we propose the community to use scientifically sound terminology, like “imaging spectroscopy” or “spectral imaging”, without using ambiguous adjectives. Further, we encourage the community to define and agree upon clear adjectives to describe the number of variables in the naming of our imaging technique.

All-words Word Sense Disambiguation for Russian Using Automatically Generated Text Collection

Abstract The limited amount of the sense annotated data is a big challenge for the word sense disambiguation task. As a solution to this problem, we propose an algorithm of automatic generation and labelling of the training collections based on the monosemous relatives concept. In this article we explore the limits of this algorithm: we employ it to harvest training collections for all ambiguous nouns, verbs and adjectives presented in RuWordNet thesaurus and then evaluate the quality of the obtained collections. We demonstrate that our approach can create high-quality labelled collections with almost full-coverage of the RuWordNet polysemous words. Furthermore, we show that our method can be applied to the Word-in-Context task.

The hype in spectral imaging

Hyperspectral imaging is currently a very well-known and much used technology for measuring features in different fields, such as chemistry, geology, medicine, food and agriculture, either spaceborne (satellites), airborne (drones) or at close proximity (e.g. field scanning, industrial sorting lines or microscopy). Its background is two-fold, and it can be considered as a special case of spectroscopy (“imaging spectroscopy”) or a special case of imaging (“spectral imaging”). Current practice is to use adjectives such as multi and hyper added to “spectral imaging” in order to characterise the number of wavelength bands. In this paper we propose the community to use scientifically sound terminology, like “imaging spectroscopy” or “spectral imaging”, without using ambiguous adjectives. Further, we encourage the community to define and agree upon clear adjectives to describe the number of variables in the naming of our imaging technique.

The Interpretation of Adjective-N Sequences in Spanish Heritage

Adjectives appear predominantly postnominally in Spanish, and when prenominal, cannot be interpreted as restrictive. We explore whether heritage speakers of Spanish have the same interpretive and ordering restriction as monolinguals. Twenty-two US college-age heritage speakers and 17 college-age monolinguals from Peru completed a rating task that manipulated word order and interpretation. Items varied in word order (Adj-N/N-Adj) and interpretation (restrictive-only, color and nationality adjectives, and ambiguous adjectives, restrictive and non-restrictive), all framed within a context that favored a restrictive interpretation. Both groups judged Adj-N orders lower than N-Adj orders, and restrictive adjectives lower in prenominal position than ambiguous adjectives. Consequently, we argue that heritage speakers (HS) have the relevant knowledge regarding word order and interpretation, and the interactions among the two properties. We propose a syntactic representation involving NP-raising for both groups, and suggest that in some cases, the higher copy of the NP is deleted, resulting in the linear order Adj-N. We also argue that this analysis may explain the range of individual variation across heritage speakers.

Ambiguous adjectives in French: the case of “gros” when combined with deverbal nouns

In this paper, I analysed the interaction between the French adjective “gros” and -eur deverbal nouns. This adjective gives rise to a preferred non-intersective reading when it is in a prenominal position, but only an intersective reading when it appears after the noun. I claim that it is necessary to take into account both the semantics of the adjective and the semantics of the noun to account for the ambiguity present at the DP-level (a “blame both” analysis). An abstract operator, eur, is always present within deverbal nouns such as “fumeur” (“smoker”), and is partially responsible for the interpretation of the DP: if the adjective is within the scope of this operator, the DP will assume a non-intersective reading, whereas when it is outside of its scope, the DP bears an intersective interpretation. The adjective “gros” itself actually has two semantic values: one modifies the event argument present in deverbal nouns, and the other modifies the individual argument of the noun (the agent of the verbal root).

A holistic model of mining product aspects and associated sentiments from online reviews

Online product reviews are considered a significant information resource useful for both potential customers and product manufacturers. In order to extract the fundamental product aspects and their associated sentiments from those reviews of plain texts, aspect-based sentiment analysis has emerged and has been regarded as a promising technology. This paper proposes a novel model to realize aspect-based sentiment summarization in an integrative way: composing the system with consistently designed feature extraction and clustering, collocation orientation disambiguation, and sentence sentiment strength calculation. Collocations of product features and opinion words are initially extracted through pattern-based bootstrapping. A novel confidence estimation method considering two measurements, Prevalence and Reliability, is exploited to assess both patterns and features. The obtained features are further clustered into aspects. Each cluster is assigned a weight based on arithmetic means of feature similarities and confidences. The orientations of dynamic sentiment ambiguous adjectives (DSAAs) are then determined within opinion collocations. Finally, sentiment strengths of opinion clauses for each aspect are computed according to a set of fine-grained and stratified scoring formulae. Experimental results on a benchmark data set validates the effectiveness of the proposed model.

SemEval-2010 task 18: disambiguating sentiment ambiguous adjectives

Sentiment ambiguous adjectives, which have been neglected by most previous researches, pose a challenging task in sentiment analysis. We present an evaluation task at SemEval-2010, designed to provide a framework for comparing different approaches on this problem. The task focuses on 14 Chinese sentiment ambiguous adjectives, and provides manually labeled test data. There are 8 teams submitting 16 systems in this task. In this paper, we define the task, describe the data creation, list the participating systems, and discuss different approaches.

Examining ambiguous adjectives in adjective-noun phrases

The meaning of a modifier is influenced by the noun it modifies (Murphy, 1988). To determine how alternative senses of ambiguous adjectives are represented, we examined the processing of noun phrases. Ambiguous adjectives were paired with nouns such that the interpretation of the phrases used the dominant or subdominant sense (e.g., green conference). Participants verified interpretations (Experiments 1 and 2) or made sense-nonsense judgments (Experiments 3 and 4) to target phrases that were preceded by primes that were related to a single sense of the ambiguous modifier. Responses to targets were facilitated by consistent primes, and either unaffected (in the verification task) or facilitated (in the sense-nonsense task) by inconsistent primes. Furthermore, responses were influenced by the strength of both senses. Results support ambiguous word representation as a shared core-meaning with sense specialization.

Toward a standard nomenclature for imagery spatial resolution

Currently, the remote sensing community uses vague and ambiguous adjectives to relay the resolution of remote sensing imagery. This short technical note proposes a nomenclature based on metric units of the metre as a way to standardize the description of satellite imagery spatial resolution.

Knowing what a novel word is not: Two-year-olds ‘listen through’ ambiguous adjectives in fluent speech

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives preceding familiar target nouns were accented or deaccented. Target word recognition was disrupted only when lexically ambiguous adjectives were accented like nouns. Experiment 2 measured the extent of interference experienced by children when interpreting prenominal words as nouns. In Experiment 3, adults used prosodic cues to identify the form class of adjective/noun homophones in string-identical sentences before the ambiguous words were fully spoken. Results show that children and adults use prosody in conjunction with lexical and distributional cues to ‘listen through’ prenominal adjectives, avoiding costly misinterpretation.

Knowledge and Strategies for Processing Lexical Metaphor after Right or Left Hemisphere Brain Damage

This study was designed to assess how unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) affects the knowledge and processing of metaphoric aspects of word meaning. Ambiguous adjectives that could convey either a metaphoric or a literal meaning were used as target words in auditory lexical decision tasks. Targets were preceded by primes that were valid (related to the target's metaphoric or literal meaning), neutral, or unrelated. Prime-target pairs were presented in two attention conditions, designed to favor either relatively automatic or relatively effortful mental processing, and reaction time data were gathered. RHD stroke patients performed similarly to left-brain-damaged and normal control subjects in the automatic condition, and when provided with specific processing strategies, indicating that they retained some knowledge of metaphoric word meanings. When left to glean strategies for themselves, however, both brain-damaged groups had difficulty. These results and others from the RHD literature are discussed in terms of attentional resource capacity and attentional allocation models.

The syntactic classes of antenominal adjectives in English

The generative grammarians' problem of the derivation of ante-nominal ‘attributive’ adjectives largely stems from the assumption that all such adjectives have the same syntactic relationship with their head nouns. Jespersen's distinction between ‘restrictive’ and ‘non-restrictive’ adjectives, given scant attention by contemporary linguists, cannot be shown by I.C. analysis or by any other kind of structural analysis unless extra-sentential relationships are considered. There are three classes of ante-nominal adjectives: (1) determinative-constituent adjectives, which occur with nominals having cataphoric determinative markers ( the, that, those); (2) epithetic adjectives, which occur with nominals having anaphoric determinative markers ( the, that, these, my, etc.) or partitive determiners ( a, some); and (3) nominal-constituent adjectives, which occur with determinative markers or partitive or categorial ( φ, a, any, no, every) determiners. Indeterminate adjectives occur when classification as (1) or (3), or (2) or (3), is uncertain; and ambiguous adjectives occur when classification as (1) or (2) is uncertain. Implications are that generative grammarians must furnish quite separate derivations for these three classes; and that stylistic analysis should benefit from this type of ‘delicate’ classification.