A Gold Standard for Scalar Adjectives

Abstract

We present a gold standard for evaluating scale membership and the order of scalar adjectives. In addition to evaluating existing methods of ordering adjectives, this knowledge will aid in studying the organization of adjectives in the lexicon. This resource is the result of two elicitation tasks conducted with informants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first task is notable for gathering open-ended lexical data from informants. The data is analyzed using Cultural Consensus Theory, a framework from anthropology, to not only determine scale membership but also the level of consensus among the informants (Romney et al., 1986). The second task gathers a culturally salient ordering of the words determined to be members. We use this method to produce 12 scales of adjectives for use in evaluation.

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