Annotating Superlatives

Abstract

This paper describes a three-part annotation scheme for superlatives. The first identifies syntactic classes, since superlatives can serve different semantic purposes. The second and third only apply to superlatives that express straight-forward comparisons between targets and their comparison sets. The second form of annotation identifies the spans of each target and comparison set, which is of interest for relation extraction. The third form labels superlatives as facts or opinions, which has not yet been undertaken in the area of sentiment detection. The annotation scheme has been tested and evaluated on 500 tokens of superlatives, the results of which are presented in Section 5. In addition to providing a platform for investigating superlatives on a larger scale, this research also introduces a new text-based Wikipedia corpus which is especially suitable for linguistic research.

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