Learning Scalar Adjective Intensity from Paraphrases

AbstractAdjectives 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” < “scalding”. We show that combining this paraphrase evidence with existing, complementary pattern- and lexicon-based approaches improves the quality of systems for automatically ordering sets of scalar adjectives and inferring the polarity of indirect answers to “yes/no” questions.