A Language-independent Model for Introducing a New Semantic Relation Between Adjectives and Nouns in a W ord N et (2016)

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to show a language-independent process of creating a new semantic relation between adjectives and nouns in wordnets. The existence of such a relation is expected to improve the detection of figurative language and sentiment analysis (SA). The proposed method uses an annotated corpus to explore the semantic knowledge contained in linguistic constructs performing as the rhetorical figure Simile. Based on the frequency of occurrence of similes in an annotated corpus, we propose a new relation, which connects the noun synset with the synset of an adjective representing that noun’s specific attribute. We elaborate on adding this new relation in the case of the Serbian WordNet (SWN). The proposed method is evaluated by human judgement in order to determine the relevance of automatically selected relation items. The evaluation has shown that 84% of the automatically selected and the most frequent linguistic constructs, whose frequency threshold was equal to 3, were also selected by humans.

## introduction in this paper, we want to demonstrate that a word-net (wn) can be expanded by a new semantic relation between adjectives and nouns in a way that could allow for its usage in detecting figurative language and in existing methods of sentiment analysis. wn is used successfully for analysis of literal meaning of texts using sa methods @xcite , @xcite , @xcite . resources that came out of the princeton wordnet (pwn), such as sentiword-net @xcite , @xcite , wordnetaffect @xcite and others, which define the prior sentiment polarity (taken out of the context) of synsets are also being used. still, the intensity of sentiment polarity of the lexical representation of synsets can be reduced, increased or completely changed in a given context with the usage of rhetorical figures from the group of tropes -figures that change the meaning of words or phrases over which the figure itself is formed. these figures can be metaphor, metonymy, irony, sarcasm, oxymoron, simile, dysphemism, euphemism, hyperbole, litotes etc. @xcite . analysing the usage of figurative language in the form of ironic similes, @xcite noticed that they act similarly to valence shifters @xcite "not", "never" and "avoid" in text, because they change the polarity of sentiment words or phrases. in general, modifiers decrease, increase or change the sentiment polarity of words or phrases. tropes work in a similar way. by definition, irony and sarcasm change the polarity, dysphemism and hyperbole increase the existing level of sentiment expressiveness, while litotes and euphemism decrease that expressiveness. metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron and simile have a more complex mechanism of affecting both directions of change regarding the strength and polarity of sentiment. automatic detection of figurative language is a new area of interest in the field of sa that can improve the existing sa methods. @xcite showed that the precision of classification in an sa task can be improved significantly (from 54% to 89.05% max.) when predictors detecting figurative speech are involved, com-pared to a set of predictors that treat the text literally. similarly, @xcite improved the sa method of machine learning by integrating it with a rule-based method which detects the usage of figurative language, so the integrated methods achieved better precision than the baseline. ## related work wordnet is a dynamic, flexible structure that can be expanded in different ways and for various purposes. in certain cases, introducing morphosemantic relations results in solving the problems that stem from specificities of a language with rich morphology and derivation @xcite . otherwise, introducing new semantic relations can lead to the improvement of the representation of relations between synsets, e.g. @xcite present a semantic relation scalar middle with which the antonimy relation of two descriptive adjective synsets is transformed into a triple gradable structure lower-upper-middle. @xcite define a new relation commonsense with which a literal in a synset is being connected with wikipedia links in which it is described, while @xcite introduce a series of relations pertinent to adjectives, e.g. derivational relations comparative and superlative define gradable forms of descriptive adjectives. derivational relation similarity defines a relation between an adjective and a noun such that, based on a given adjective, the structure or form of the object described by the noun can be discovered. similarly, derivational relation characterstic defines a relation between an adjective and a noun where the contents or quality of an object described by the noun is known based on the adjective, e.g. based on the statement "if someone is famous, then he is characterised by fame" the relation characteristic will be set between the noun fame and the adjective famous. the new semantic relation between nouns and adjectives in the portuguese wordnet is described in @xcite and @xcite . this relation is given in the form of a pair of inverse relations a characteristic of / has as a characteristic. according to the authors, although the purpose of the relation is to mark significant characteristics of a noun expressed by an adjective (e.g.'{carnivorous} is a characteristic of {shark}'), the status of this relation in the sense of lexical knowledge is not completely clear. au-thors also point out that introducing this new relation enriches a wordnet, that it can contribute to the process of determining the semantic domain of an adjective and that it can be included in reasoning applications. veale and hao also suggest specific enrichment of wordnet in their papers @xcite and @xcite . as a source to be used in that enrichment, authors suggest semantic knowledge contained in language constructs of the form as adj as a noun which, in fact, are similes (e.g. "as free as a bird", "as busy as a bee"). in order to obtain examples of simile, the authors first extracted all antonymous pairs of adjectives in pwn and made a list of candidate adjectives. for each adjective adj from that list, a query in the form as adj as a * was made and sent to the google search engine. out of the obtained results, the first 200 snippets were kept. a collection of as adj as a noun constructs was made and a task of disambiguation was performed over it. in this process, one noun (peacock) can semantically be connected to many adjectives based on different semantic grounds. the structure, named by the authors as frame:slot:filler, consists of a noun (frame), property of the noun (slot) and an adjective as a value of the property (filler). for one noun there can be a number of instances of such structure. authors point out that an average number of slot:filler constructs per one noun obtained in this particular research was 8. for instance, the noun peacock contains the following set of slot:filler values: {has feather: brilliant; has plumage: extravagant; has strut: proud; has tail: elegant; has display: colorful; has manner: stately; has appearance: beauti-ful}, therefore the suggested enrichment of word-net only for the noun peacock leads to addition of 7 relations out of which the first one is of the form '{peacock} has feather {brilliant}'. ## motivation the research described in this paper is based on the previously mentioned research results by @xcite and @xcite , because we are searching for specific relations between nouns and adjectives. however, unlike the relation has as a characteristic which connects a number of nouns {shark, cobra, orca, predator,...} to the same adjective {carnivorous}, we consider those descriptive adjectives that are specific to a small set of nouns, or only to a single noun. in the process of generating of the new relation, we are proposing usage of the rhetorical figure simile which has a relatively high frequency of occurrence in texts written in a natural language. in that case, the relation '{peludo} is a characteristic of {abelha}', meaning ('{furry} is a characteristic of {bee}'), which exists in the portuguese wordnet, would not be an adequate example, but the new relation would be created based on the common rhetorical figure simile "as busy as a bee" in which case the relation would be '{busy} specific of {bee}'. on the other hand, significant research, that the work described in this paper leans on, is depicted in papers by @xcite and ( 2010 ), regarding the development of automatic methods of extracting semantic knowledge out of examples of the simile figures usage. we suggest extraction of linguistic constructs of the form as adj as a noun from the corpus annotated with pos and lemmas, which means that, in contrast to the results of google search engine, the search would be faster and more precise, because in one step, we would obtain the set of those potential figures of simile that have only nouns positioned at the end of the observed linguistic structure. furthermore, if we do not take into account all of the attributes that are characteristic for a certain noun, but only those that are used the most in everyday language (measured by the frequency of occurrence of the corresponding figure simile in the observed corpus) we would get the possibility to describe the set of "noun-adjective" candidates for expansion of the existing structure of wordnet with one unique relation (specificof/specifiedby). introduction of a single relation would eliminate the risk pointed out in @xcite that the introduction of a large number of relations expressed by the structure slot:filler would reduce the system's ability to recognize similar properties. in a case of one relation, for example, {frame: has strut: proud} and {frame: has gait: ma-jestic} would be transformed into {frame: spec-ifiedby: proud} and {frame: specifiedby: ma-jestic}. apart from that, taking into account only the most frequent ones, the described transformation would not involve all of the slot:filler structures of a certain noun, but only the most frequent one, which would, in the case of the noun peacock result in generating only one relation '{peacock} specifiedby {proud}', and not all seven of them. if we introduce the frequency threshold as a parameter, its change can affect the number of specificof/specifiedby relations for the single noun synset, as well as for the total number of relations of that type. with the suggested relation specifi-cof/specifiedby we can determine the nature of the semantic connection between the concepts arrow, light and rabbit, which cannot be achieved with the existing pwn relations. namely, the simile constructs brz kao zec "as fast as a rabbit", brz kao svetlost "as fast as light", brz kao strela "as fast as an arrow", obtained by querying over the corpus of contemporary serbian, we can confirm that '{strela, svetlost, zec} specifiedby {brz}'i.e. '{arrow, light, rabbit} specifiedby {fast}'holds true. ## language-independent model for wordnet expansion the procedure of expansion with the relation specificof/specifiedby that we are proposing, will be shown on the example of expansion of the serbian wordnet (swn) @xcite , but it can also be used for other wordnets. the procedure consists of the following steps: 1) from the annotated corpus of a natural language k l extract linguistic constructs of the form pridev kao imenica (in the case of english as adj as a noun) and create the set sims such that: in our case, from the corpus of contemporary serbian language foot_0 (utvić, 2014) 5952 concordances of the form "<as adj as a @xmath0, such as the following: algorithm input: adjective as noun text file output: 1. a pair of wordnet mutually inverse semantic relations (specificof/specifiedby) for each input adjective-noun pair 2. file containing adjectives and all their senses 3. file containing nouns and all their senses foreach adjective-noun pair in adjective-noun pairs if ((adjective exists in wordnet.adjective.literals) and (noun exists in wordnet.noun.literals)) { if ((wordnet.senses(adjective).@xmath1.senses(noun).@xmath2.sense(adjective).firstsense) and (wordnet.sense(noun).firstsense) ) { create relation(specificof,adjective,noun); create relation(specifiedby,noun,adjective); } else foreach (sense in wordnet.senses(adjective)) { add to adjective senses(adjective,sense,synsetid)} foreach (sense in wordnet.senses(noun)) { add to noun senses(noun,sense,synsetid)} } } prior to the implementation of the given algo-rithm, we examined the swn in order to determine its structure in terms of the previously described restrictions. swn has more than 22,000 synsets, contains 1660 synsets of adjectives with one literal, out of which in 1452 synsets the sense of that literal is the first sense, while the number of noun synsets with one literal, where the sense of that literal is the first sense is 15,035. by implementing the suggested algorithm, out of a total of 1059 adj-noun pairs, 69 pairs were found which are "pairs whose both members have one sense and that sense is the first sense". in swn there are 302 adj-noun pairs in which there is more than one sense or that sense is not the first sense. the 688 pairs that are left pertain to those cases when at least one member of the adj-noun pair does not exist as a literal in swn. therefore, using the proposed method produces 372 candidates that can be connected in swn by the relation specificof/specifiedby after approval. for 302 adj-noun pairs present in swn, but with many senses or with one sense that is not the first sense, a web page is created in the swne foot_1 application @xcite which allows users to input adjectives, thus generating a column with synsets lexicalized by the given adjective, while inputting nouns leads to generating of the second column, with synsets lexicalized by the noun at hand. new relations can be generated by looking for appropriate synsets and senses in adjective senses and noun senses files as well as by chosing the desired relation from the third column. ## evaluation in order to assess whether the frequency of occurrence is a valid parameter for finding adj-noun pairs which are parts of similes that are used in everyday life, we used an online survey which was carried out through google forms. comparing the list (marked here as list1) which was automatically generated using the corpus and filtered using steps 1-4 explained in section 4, and ordered in a decreasing order according to pair frequency, with the list which, in fact, represents a subset of the list1 of those pairs that were marked positively in the anonymized survey (marked as list2), we wanted to assess which frequency threshold value entails the results obtained in the survey. the survey itself was conducted over the time period of 5 days, such that a total of 4 forms were published successively. anonymous users of the social network facebook were supposed to give an answer to each question generated on the basis of adj-noun pairs from the list1 list with a goal of finding out whether "in everyday language we can say that someone/something is adj as noun?". the answers were yes or no and answering all questions in a form was mandatory. the the problem with this kind of participant in-volvement and with posts on facebook in general is that the novelty wears off fast and if some post is very popular today, it might not be popular at all tomorrow. the call for participation in this project did receive a lot of attention in the first few hours after being posted on facebook. the privacy for the post was set to public, which meant that everyone could participate and share the link leading to the google forms. due to the fact that people did share the link, and some of their friends did the same thing, we could see that the forms were being filled in quickly and that our research was getting a lot of attention. in the following three days, we posted another three forms on the same url address (precisely because the post received a lot of attention and shares) and we were able to get enough responses in order to get valid results. on the fourth day, the novelty wore off and we were getting significantly fewer responses, which only proved our assumption that we had to move fast and to post new forms every day. first, we measured the contribution of participants and determined the set of those participants whose results were to be taken into account as relevant, on the basis that there was no substantial difference between arithmetic means of their answers. in order to measure the participants' contribution we generated 7 subsets of questions and answers where each set had less than 30 questions (units) using four spreadsheets containing participants' answers, as it is shown in after that, inter-annotator (participant) agreement was evaluated using the krippendorff α coefficient (kalpha). when the value of α is in the [0, 1] interval, it represents the agreement level which ranges from complete disagreement, when α = 0, to complete agreement, when α = 1. the α measure can also have a negative value, up to -1, when two mistakes are present: mistake in sampling and mistake in systemic disagreement. considering an acceptable level of reliability, the works of @xcite , @xcite and @xcite show that agreements whose values are α ≥ 0.667 are reliable, and that agreements whose values are α ≥ 0.8 can be considered very reliable. the results we obtained using the kalpha test over the set of 5 annotators for each of the subsets of the forms is given in finally, we wanted to assess how much the change of the frequency threshold influenced the relevance of automatically selected adj-noun pairs, measured based on the results obtained through the surveys. the list list1 has been reduced so that it contains forms 1, 2a, 2b and 3a which amounted to 93 elements, that is to say, all adj-noun pairs for which evaluation by the participants was proved relevant. that list was named list1'. in contrast, the list named list2' contained only those adj-noun pairs from the list1' that were marked positively. first, we wanted to set the frequency threshold to @xmath4, which meant that the algorithm was used to process only those pairs whose frequency of occurrence in the corpus was @xmath5. there were 23 such pairs in the list list1'. out of those 23, 19 pairs were present in the list list2', which meant that the participants in the survey did not recognize 4 pairs that were recognized by the algorithm. the entire statistics showing the percentage of pairs we obtained using the algorithm as well as human judgement is given in figure 1 : relationship of selected pairs obtained with the survey method compared to the ones obtained with the method of the most frequent occurrence for different frequency thresholds. figure 1 shows the way in which, on a sample of 93 adj-noun pairs contained in the list2' list (kalpha reliable), the percentage of participation of the manually selected pairs changes in the subset obtained by choosing only those pairs from the same list whose frequency was equal or higher than the set threshold, when the threshold changes. the achieved result of 84% gives us the manually measured accuracy of the algorithm for automatic wordnet expansion with the frequency threshold of @xmath6. ## conclusions in this work, we presented a general way of automatic expansion of a wordnet with the semantic relation specificof/specifiedby which was produced after extraction of semantic knowledge contained in the relation of comparison from the annotated corpus. the results of the proposed method of selection of the most frequent adj-noun pairs extracted from the described linguistic constructs as adj as a noun for the frequency threshold @xmath7, on identical sets of adj-noun pairs. the algorithm for automatic wordnet expansion can be improved in step 5) by including the word sense disambiguation (wsd) method. that would enable literals with more than one sense to be used in automatic adding of the new relation. in future work we plan to implement wsd and to use other linguistic constructs which indicate simile. using the relation specificof/specifiedby between a noun and its specific adjective, the hidden meaning of another word or a phrase can be detected, e.g. in sentences such as "my sister is like a bee" or "my sister is a bee", based on the relation specificof/specifiedby between the noun bee and its specific adjective busy, a sentiment neutral noun sister can have the same sentiment polarity as the adjective busy, i.e. positive polarity. if we say "my sister is like a lizard", based on the same principle, the same noun changes its sentiment polarity into negative polarity, considering the fact that the noun lizard is connected with a relation specifiedby with the adjective lazy. in the example "my sister is as fast as a turtle" the indirect connection of the antonymous pair fast-slow in the construct "as fast as a turtle" indicates the existence of the rhetorical figure irony, therefore, in a given context, the noun sister can have a negative sentiment polarity. in our future work, we plan on analysing whether the process of sentiment classification can be improved by changing the default sentiment polarity of n-gram predictors, depending on the figurative context detected in the previously described way.