Adverbs in pl W ord N et: Theory and Implementation (2016)

Abstract: Adverbs are seldom well represented in wordnets. Princeton WordNet, for example, derives from adjectives practically all its adverbs and whatever involvement they have. GermaNet stays away from this part of speech. Adverbs in plWordNet will be emphatically present in all their semantic and syntactic distinctness. We briefly discuss the linguistic background of the lexical system of Polish adverbs. We describe an automated generator of accurate candidate adverbs, and introduce the lexicographic procedures which will ensure high consistency of wordnet editors’ decisions about adverbs.

## adverbs in wordnets and monographs adverbs have yet to receive their due in wordnets. there are only few adverbs in wordnet (hardly, mostly, really, etc.) as the majority of english adverbs are straightforwardly derived from adjectives via morphological affixation (surprisingly, strangely, etc.) @xcite germanet shares the basic division of the database into the four lexical categories noun, adjective, verb, and adverb with wordnet r , although it is not planned to implement adverbs in the current work phase. @xcite curiously, english monographs on lexical semantics (cruse, 1997; geeraerts, 2010) give the adverb a short shrift. the term does not even appear in the index of either book! yes, most adverbs do derive from adjectives. @xcite and yet, the adverb is a bona fide open-class part of speech. its distinctness and its peculiarities cannot be "swept under the carpet" by making it merely an inflected adjective. polish morphology acknowledges the adverb grudgingly, but at least it is present in several monographs, notably in (grzegorczykowa, 1975). the paper presents a definition of adverbs in plwordnet (section 2), a procedure to generate candidate adverbs (section 3), a manual verification (section 4) and a few conclusions (section 5). ## adverbs in plwordnet the designers of plwordnet established a spectrum of relations for nouns, verbs and adjectives (maziarz et al., 2011a; maziarz et al., 2011b; maziarz et al., 2012). every relation type has its own test expressions. (the substitution of lexical units for variables yields correct expressions in polish.) language forces the tests to be polymorphic. that is because an adverb can modify a verb, an adjective or an adverb, and it can appear in a predicative position (jest 'to be 3 rd person ' + adverb). ## automatic generation of candidate adverbs we followed six steps in the generation of new adverbs from their adjective bases. we worked all along with a copy of plwordnet, which we denote plwordnet c . ## manual verification we evaluate the procedure from section 3 in three experiments, two before copying plwordnet c onto plwordnet (s l , s t ), and one afterwards (s v ). the former two were based on simple random samples of 69 (s l ) and 70 (s t ) adjective lexical units from plwordnet. the development set s l helped write and check the filtering rules in section 3. as a baseline b l we chose the procedure's performance, without filtering, on the first set of 69 adjectives. the test set s t was used to reassess the measures of efficiency. the randomly drawn adjectives were checked manually by plwordnet editors (all of them linguists with a university degree) for correspondence with adverbial lexical units . in the s l sample ( the set w + ∩ a -contains false positives: adverbs which do not exist in reality but were introduced by the algorithm. the set w -∩ a + contains false negatives: adverbs which do exist in language but were omitted by the algorithm. for illustration, we present their elements. precision and recall answer two questions: our procedure performed better on the s l sample, with a statistically significant increase of precision (from 70% to 93%), and a small, not significant, decrease of recall (from 72% to 69%). the size of the adverbial base in plwordnet c was only 10% smaller after filtering the original base (see the row m in the results were promising, so we drew yet another sample s t . now precision was still high, but recall was lower, however -since we ran the very same algorithm as in s l -the size m of adverb plwordnet c (in lexical units) did not change. with high precision and a reasonably slight "leakage" of lexical units (reasonably high m ), we finally decided to copy plwordnet c onto the live base plwordnet. the plwordnet c set consisted of wordnet. around one of four-five lexical units is not an appropriate adverb lexical unit; one of four-five existing senses of a given lemma is missing. @xcite 5 whither adverbs in plwordnet? we have so far only considered adverbs which can be generated from adjectives in plwordnet. it stands to reason that coverage could increase if we worked instead with corpus-based frequency lists. figure 2 presents coverage of a lexicon built from the plwordnet corpus. @xcite the more frequent an adverb is, the more likely it is to appear plwordnet. even for the least frequent adverbs, the coverage is still a high 62%. @xcite note that this is no longer a simple random sample: editors work on packages with lists of senses of the same lemma, also synonyms and hyponyms/hypernyms of the senses. the sampling design most resembles cluster sampling. the confidence interval must be treated here as an approximation. @xcite the corpus consists of 250m tokens in the ics pas corpus (przepiórkowski, 2004); 113m tokens of news items (weiss, 2008); ≈80m tokens in a corpus made of polish wikipedia (wikipedia, 2010); an annotated corpus kpwr with ≈0.5m tokens (broda et al., 2012); ≈60m tokens of shorthand notes from the polish parliament; and ≈1.2 billion tokens collected from the internet. row 4 in clearly, the adding of adverbs to plwordnet is work in progress. detailed instructions for the editors, 4 in keeping with our practice over the years, are meant to ensure the consistency of editorial decisions. editors now verify, add to and complete the list of adverb lexical units, automatically generated from plwordnet's adjectives. next, we plan to add multi-word lexical units of the po polsku type and of other types.