Comparing methods for deriving intensity scores for adjectives

Abstract

We compare several different corpus-based and lexicon-based methods for the scalar ordering of adjectives. Among them, we examine for the first time a low-resource approach based on distinctive-collexeme analysis that just requires a small predefined set of adverbial modifiers. While previous work on adjective intensity mostly assumes one single scale for all adjectives, we group adjectives into different scales which is more faithful to human perception. We also apply the methods to both polar and non-polar adjectives, showing that not all methods are equally suitable for both types of adjectives.