This paper explores the determinants of adjective-noun plausibility by using correlation analysis to compare judgements elicited from human subjects with five corpus-based variables : co-occurrence frequency of the adjective-noun pair , noun frequency , conditional probability of the noun given the adjective , the log-likelihood ratio , and Resnik 's ( 1993 ) selectional association measure . The highest correlation is obtained with the co-occurrence frequency , which points to the strongly lexicalist and collocational nature of adjective-noun combinations . Research on linguistic plausibility has focused mainly on the effects of argument plausibility during the processing of locally ambiguous sentences . Psycholinguists have investigated whether the plausibility of the direct object affects reading times for sentences like ( 1 ) . Here , argument plausibility refers to " pragmatic plausibility " or " local semantic fit " ( Holmes et al . , 1989 ) , and judgements of plausibility are typically obtained by asking subjects to rate sentence fragments containing verb-argument combinations ( as an example consider the bracketed parts of the sentences in ( 1 ) ) . Such experiments typically use an ordinal scale for plausibility ( e.g. , from 1 to 7 ) . ( 1 ) a. [ The senior senator regretted the decision ] had ever been made public . b. [ The senior senator regretted the reporter ] had ever seen the report . The majority of research has focussed on investigating the effect of rated plausibility for verb-object combinations in human sentence processing ( Garnsey et al . , 1997 ; Pickering and Traxler , 1998 ) . However , plausibility effects have also been observed for adjectivenoun combinations in a head-modifier relationship . Murphy ( 1990 ) has shown that typical adjectivenoun phrases ( e.g. , salty olives ) are easier to interpret in comparison to atypical ones ( e.g. , sweet olives ) . Murphy provides a schema-based explanation for this finding by postulating that in typical adjective-noun phrases , the adjective modifies part of the noun 's schema and consequently it is understood more quickly , whereas in atypical combinations , the adjective modifies non-schematic aspects of the noun , which leads to interpretation difficulties . Smadja ( 1991 ) argues that the reason people prefer strong tea to powerful tea and powerful car to strong car is neither purely syntactic nor purely semantic , but rather lexical . A similar argument is put forward by Cruse ( 1986 ) , who observes that the adjective spotless collocates well with the noun kitchen , relatively worse with the noun complexion and not all with the noun taste . According to Cruse , words like spotless have idiosyncratic collocational restrictions : differences in the degree of acceptability of the adjective and its collocates do not seem to depend on the meaning of the individual words . This paper explored the determinants of linguistic plausibility , a concept that is potentially relevant for lexical choice in natural language generation systems . Adjective-noun plausibility served as a test bed for a number of corpus-based models of linguistic plausibility . Plausibility judgements were obtained from human subjects for 90 randomly selected adjective-noun pairs . The ratings revealed a clear effect of familiarity of the adjective-noun pair ( operationalised by corpus co-occurrence frequency ) . In a correlation analysis we compared judged plausibility with the predictions of five corpus-based variables . The highest correlation was obtained with the co-occurrence frequency of the adjective-noun pair . Conditional probability , the log-likelihood ratio , and Resnik 's ( 1993 ) selectional association measure were also significantly correlated with plausibility ratings . The correlation with Resnik 's measure was negative , contrary to the predictions of his model . This points to a problem with his technique for estimating word class frequencies , which is aggravated by the collocational nature of noun-adjective combinations . Overall , the results confirm the strongly lexicalist and collocational nature of adjective-noun combinations . This fact could be exploited in a generation system by taking into account corpus co-occurrence counts for adjective-noun pairs ( which can be obtained straightforwardly ) during lexical choice . Future research has to identify how this approach can be generalised to unseen data .

Challenge: Existing studies on the plausibility of texts focus on verb-object combinations while there could be some impacts from adjective-noun pairs as well.
Approach: They perform correlational analysis to explore the determinants of adjective-noun plausibility against human judgements.
Outcome: They show that co-occurrence frequency correlates play the biggest role as the determinans of adjective-noun plausibility.