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TextWiki: a superlative resource

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Abstract

Although superlatives are commonly used in natural language, so far there has been no large-scale computational investigation of the types of comparisons they express. This article describes a comprehensive annotation scheme for superlatives, which classifies superlatives according to their surface forms and motivates an initial focus on so-called “ISA superlatives”. This type of superlative comparison is especially suitable for a computational approach because both their targets and comparison sets are explicitly realised in the text, and the proposed annotation scheme offers guidelines for annotating the spans of such comparative elements. The annotations are tested and evaluated on 500 tokens of superlatives with good inter-annotator agreement. In addition to providing a platform for investigating superlatives on a larger scale, this research also introduces a new text-based Wikipedia corpus in which all superlative instances have been annotated according to the proposed annotation scheme, and which has been used to develop a tool that can reliably distinguish between different superlative types, and identify the comparative components of ISA superlatives.

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Notes

  1. http://trec.nist.gov/.

  2. http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2002T31.

  3. Adapted from http://trec.nist.gov/data/qa/2004_qadata/QA2004_testset.xml.

  4. http://trec.nist.gov/data/qa.html.

  5. Superlative targets (T S ) and their comparison sets (CS) are defined as shown in Sect. 1.

  6. “Qid” refers to the question ID in the TREC data set.

  7. I would like to thank Nitin Jindal and Bing Liu for making their data available.

  8. Altogether, 285 sentences were labelled as non-equal, 110 as equative, and 169 as superlative.

  9. I would like to thank Malvina Nissim and Johan Bos for making their data available.

  10. http://en.wikipedia.org.

  11. http://inex.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/.

  12. Sentence mark-up was added automatically using the TTT2 tools (Grover and Tobin 2006).

  13. Email the author at Silke.Scheible@manchester.ac.uk.

  14. For the ISA class, there is also a distinction to be made between Type 1 and Type 2.

  15. Note that the target may be expressed in terms of a pronoun.

  16. For a more detailed description of the ISA-2 class, see Scheible (2009).

  17. Here, square brackets indicate a list of restrictors.

  18. http://www.gate.ac.uk.

  19. The corpus includes sentence mark-up added by Jijkoun and de Rijke (2006).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an EPSRC Doctoral Training Award at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. I would like to thank Professor Bonnie Webber for her helpful comments and suggestions on this article.

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  1. School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Silke Scheible

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Scheible, S. TextWiki: a superlative resource. Lang Resources & Evaluation 46, 635–666 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9171-y

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