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Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons pp 99–119Cite as

Lexical Rules for Deverbal Adjectives

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Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 10))

Abstract

This paper deals with a particular microtheory developed in the framework of the Mikrokosmos computational semantic project.The microtheory of adjectival semantics is considered in one specific aspect, namely, the optimization and facilitation of the lexical entries for deverbal adjectives with the help of lexical rules deriving such entries from those of the corresponding verbs. Deverbal adjectives turn out to be the largest single subclass in the adjective lexical category. Unlike scalar and relative (or relational) adjectives, which are anchored in property and object concepts, respectively, in the underlying ontology, deverbal adjectives are based on process concepts. While acquisition with lexical rules is necessary, universal and efficient for the class of deverbal adjectives, our research shows that, often in spite of the strong appearance to the contrary, such acquisition is neither fully automatic nor cost-free. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. The findings are largely language-independent, and only English examples are used throughout the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Victor Raskin & Sergei Nirenburg

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  1. Victor Raskin
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  2. Sergei Nirenburg
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA

    Evelyne Viegas

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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Raskin, V., Nirenburg, S. (1999). Lexical Rules for Deverbal Adjectives. In: Viegas, E. (eds) Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0952-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0952-1_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5347-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0952-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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