Learning scalar adjective intensity from paraphrases

Abstract

Adjectives like warm, hot, and scalding all describe temperature but differ in intensity. Understanding these differences between adjectives is a necessary part of reasoning about natural language. We propose a new paraphrase-based method to automatically learn the relative intensity relation that holds between a pair of scalar adjectives. Our approach analyzes over 36k adjectival pairs from the Paraphrase Database under the assumption that, for example, paraphrase pair really hot ↔ scalding suggests that hot