Semantic Analysis of Abstract Nouns to Compile a Thesaurus of Adjectives

Abstract

Aiming to compile a thesaurus of adjectives, we discuss how to extract abstract nouns categorizing adjectives, clarify the semantic and syntactic functions of these abstract nouns, and manually evaluate the capability to extract the “instance-category” relations. We focused on some Japanese syntactic structures and utilized possibility of omission of abstract noun to decide whether or not a semantic relation between an adjective and an abstract noun is an “instance-category” relation. For 63% of the adjectives (57 groups/90 groups) in our experiments, our extracted categories were found to be most suitable. For 22 % of the adjectives (20/90), the categories in the EDR lexicon were found to be most suitable. For 14% of the adjectives (13/90), neither our extracted categories nor those in EDR were found to be suitable, or examinees’ own categories were considered to be more suitable. From our experimental results, we found that the correspondence between a group of adjectives and their category name was more suitable in our method than in the EDR lexicon.

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