AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4   Info

Expert Audience

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Saarbrücken

This talk discusses polysemous adjectives whose meaning varies
depending on the nouns they modify (e.g., fast). These adjectives are
ambiguous across and within the nouns they are combined with. A fast
programmer is typically a programmer who programs quickly, whereas a
fast plane is typically a plane that flies quickly. Out-of-context,
however, a fast plane can also be interpreted as a plane that lands,
takes off, turns, or travels quickly and a fast programmer can be
someone who thinks, runs or talks quickly.

We acquire the meanings of these adjectives from a large corpus and
propose a probabilistic model which provides a ranking on the set of
possible interpretations. We identify lexical semantic information
automatically by exploiting the consistent correspondences between
surface syntactic cues and lexical meaning. We evaluate our results
against paraphrase judgments elicited experimentally from humans and
show that the model's ranking of meanings correlates reliably with
human intuitions: meanings that are found highly probable by the model
are also rated as plausible by the subjects.
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Werner Saurer

302-4177

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