Adjectival Modification in Text Meaning Representation 
Victor Raskin and Sergei Nirenburg 
Computing Research Laboratory 
New Mexico State University 
Las Cruces, N.M. 88003, U.S.A. 
raskin, sergei@crl.nmsu.edu 
Abstract 
Tiffs work belongs to a family of research efforts, 
called nficrotheories and aimed at describing the 
static inemfing of all lexical categories in several 
languages in the fr,'unework of tile MikroKosmos 
project on computational semantics. The latter 
also involves other static microtheories describ- 
ing world kalowledge and syntax-semantics map- 
ping as well as dynamic microtheories comlected 
with the actual process of text analysis. Tiffs pa- 
per describes our approach to detecting ,'rod re- 
cording adjectival meaning, compares it with the 
body of kalowledge on adjectives in literature and 
presents a detailed, practically tested methodolo- 
gy for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjec- 
fives. The work was based on the set of over 
6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives 
obtained from task-oriented corpora. 
1. The Ontological Approach 
The work on adjectives reported in tlfis paper constitutes 
a descriptive "microtheory" in the MikroKosmos seman- 
tic analyzer (Onyshkevych and Nirenburg 1994; and 
Beale et ,'d. 1995), designed to serve as a component of a 
lolowledge-based machine translation system (Nircn- 
burg ct al. 1992). 
MikroKosmos combines findings from a variety of 
quasi-antonomous microtheories of language phenom- 
ena, world knowledge organization and procedural 
knowledge at the level of coinputer system arclfitectnrc. 
The basic motivation for this organization is the contin- 
ued inability of the fields of lingnistics and NLP to pro- 
duce a general-coverage, unified theory of trealment of 
language phenomena, a failure especially pronoanced in 
,areas beyond computational syntax. 
The purpose and result of the MikroKosmos mmlysis 
process is the derivation of an interlingnal representation 
for natm'al language inlmts. The langtmge in which these 
representations arc expressed is called file "text meaning 
representation" (I'MR) langlmge, mid "texts" in dais lan- 
guage are called, simply, TMRs. TMR is a fr,'une-based 
language, where frame names typically refer to 
instances of ontological concepts, slot names are derived 
from a set of ontological properties and slot fillers ,are 
either elements of property value sets or pointers to con- 
cept instances. 
An ontology, a world model containing ilfformation 
about types of things, events mid properties in the world, 
is a necessary prerequisite for a TMR language. "An 
ontology for NLP purposes is a body of knowledge 
about the world (or a domain) that a) is a repository of 
primitive symbols used in meaning representation; b) 
organizes these symbols in a tangled subsumption hier- 
archy; • and c) further intercom~ects these symbols using 
a rich system of semmltic and discourse-pragmatic rela- 
tions defined among the concepts" (Mahesh and Niren- 
burg 1995: 1). The function of the ontology is to supply 
"world knowledge to lexical, syntactic, and semantic 
processes" (ibid). 
The lexicon in MikroKosInos "mediates between the 
TMR ,and ontology" (Onyshkevyeh and Nirenburg 1994: 
2). Lexicon entries for most open-class lexieal items 
represent word and plu:ase senses, which c~m be either 
directly mapped into ontological concepts or derived by 
locally (that is, in the lexicon entry itself) modifying 
constraints on property wducs of concepts used to spec- 
ify the meaning of the given lexical item. L6xical- 
senmntie information as well as clues for contextual 
semantic and pragmatic processing are typically located 
in the lexicon, adjectives being no exception. In the fol- 
lowing section we illustrate file structnre of those parts 
of the lexicon entry in MikroKosmos which bear on the 
description of adjectival memfing. 
2. The Ontological Approach to the 
Meaning of a Typical Adjective 
A simple, l~rototypical case of adjectival modification is 
a scalar adjective, which modifies a noun both syntacti- 
cally and semantically. Our microtheory associates its 
meaning with a region on a scale which is defined as the 
range of ml ontological property (cf. Carlson and Nix~en- 
burg, 1990). Tile contribution that the adjective makes to 
the construction of a semantic dependency structure 
842 
(FMR) typic'ally consists of inserting its meaning (a 
property-value p,'fir) as a slot filler in a frame represent- 
ing the me,-ming of the noun whidl this adjective syntac- 
tically modifies. 
Thus, in big house, big will assigu a high value as the 
filler of the property slot SIZE of the frame for the me,'m- 
ing of house. The range of the ontological property SIZE 
is a numerical and continuous scale. Each nmnerical 
0 I 
~~ ~.. nlodlUlll- SlTX~ 
Big, will, then, be assigned a vahte of '> 0.75' value on 
the SIZE scale. These values ,arc a crucial pmt of the lex- 
ical mapping (LEX-MAP) from language milts to TMR 
units included in the senmntics (SEM-STRUC) "zone" of 
their lexical entries. Equally cruci,'d is the syntactic-se- 
m,'mtic delrendency nmppiug (linking) between the syn- 
tactic-sm~eture (SYN-STRUC) and s F,M-STRUC zones, 
which in MikroKosmos is canied out with the help of 
special variables. The syntactico-scmantic information 
in file lexicon entry for big is as follows: t 
(1) (big 
(big-Adjt ;the tirst adjectival sense of BIG 
(CAT adj) 
(SYN-STRUC ;syqtactic characteristics: 
(1 ((root $varl) ;sulxzategodzation F~atern 
(cat n) ;1 (attributive); $varl is 
(mcxls ((root $wlrO))))) ;bound to the noun 
;the adjective modi ties; 
;$var0 is bound to the ad- 
;jective itself 
(2 ((root $varO) ;subcategorizatiou pattern 
(cat adj) ;2 (predicative) 
(subj ((root Svarl) ;this standard Adj 
;SYN-STRUC is 
(cat n)))))) ;omitteA from the other 
;examples 
(SEM- S'FRUC 
(LI%X-MAP ;the syntax-semantics map- 
((1 2) (size-attribute ;ping valid for both 
(domain (value ^$varl) ;patterns; ' ^' 
;means "the meaning of" 
(sem physical-object)) ;selectional 
;restriction 
(range (value (> 0.75)) ; the value is 
;in the top 25 percentile 
;of the scale 
(relaxabte-to (value (>0.6))))))))));re- 
;la×ed values are for pro- 
;cessiug metonymies 
The standard tn'ocedurc for representing adiecliwd 
modification in TMRs is, then, to insert the scale name 
1 Many zones which are actually present in the en- 
tries for these adjectives in the MikroKosmos lexi-- 
con art., omitted from the examples. 
scale can be measured in an absohtte mmmer (e.g., LIN- 
EAR-SIZE ill feet, yards, or millimeters, or TIME ill sec- 
onds). But often natural language expressions do not 
refer to absohttc magnitudes but rather to abstract rela- 
tive ones, as in file case of big,. We assume a 0 to 1 
nulncfical range for such abstract scales. For abstract 
references to SIZE, lhe fillers in English e~m Ire: 
1 
and scale value for an adjective as a prolrerty-valuc pair 
in the frame describing the meaning of the noun the 
adjective meMifies. For a noun like house, whose appro- 
pilate sense (2) is directly mapped into an ontological 
concepl, the me,'ufing of big house will be represented as 
it TMR fragment shown in (3): 
(2) (house 
(house-N 1 
(CAT n 
(SYN-STRUC 
(1 ((root $vat0) 
(cat n)))) 
(SEM- ffFP, UC 
(I,EX-MAP 
(2 (private-home)) 
(3) (priwlte-home 
(size-attribute (value > 0.75)) 
More complex cases of adjectival moditication are 
discussed in Section 4. 
3. Semantic and Computational 
Treatment of Adjectives: Old and 
New Trends 
The literature on adjectives shows a scarcity of system- 
atic semantic analyses or lexicx~graplfic descriptions of 
adjectives. Most of file linguistic scholarslfip focuses on 
tile taxonomies of adjectives, on file differences between 
the attrihutive and predicative syntactic usages as well 
as other syntaclic mmsformations associated with vari-. 
ous adjectival usages, on the qualitative/relative distinc- 
tions among adjectives, which is related to the 
predicative/attributive usages, and on the gradability/ 
comparability of qualitative adjectives (for a detailed 
survey, see Raskin and Nirenhurg 1995: 3~20). 
As colnputational semantics m~wes to large-scale 
syslcms serving non-toy dom~fins, the need for large let- 
icons with entries of all lexical categories is Ireconfing 
increasingly acute, and the attention is turning more 
towards such previously neglected or avoklcd categories 
as the adjectives. Recently, there have appeared some 
first indications of lifts attetlfion.--sce, lk)r instance, 
843 
Smadja (1991), Beekwith et al. (1991), Bouillon and 
Viegas (1994), and Pustejovsky (1995). This research is 
a step in the same direction. 
Our analysis of adjectives, with the goal of support- 
ing semantic analysis, shows that the issues important 
for adjective meaning representation are quite different 
from those debated in literature on adjectives. Thns, it 
becomes clear that the scalar~non-scalar dichotomy, 
and not the attributive~predicative distinction which 
dominates the literature, is the single most important 
distinction in semantic treatment of adjectives. The con- 
tinuous numerical scales associated with the true scalars 
also render the issue of gradability and comparability 
rather trivial (see Raskin and Nirenburg 1995: 25-26). 
Another essential issue is the grain size of descrip- 
tion. In (3) the linking attribute (SIZE) is selected rather 
high in the hierarchy of attributes, because in the ontol- 
ogy SIZE-ATTRIBUTE is the parent of such properties as 
LENGTH-A TT R I BUT E, WlDTtI-AqTRIBUTE, A R E A- 
ATTRIBUTE, WEIGHT-ATTRIBUTE, etc. If the context does 
not allow the analyzer to select one of those, a coarser- 
grain solution is preferred. In other words, we represent 
the meaning of big house without specifying whether 
big pertains to the length, width, height or area of a 
house. This is the result of a principled decision, based 
on the principle of practical effability 2(Raskin and 
Nirenburg 1995: 46ff), which stipulates that, in MT, the 
target l,'mguage should be expected to have a corre- 
sponding adjective of a comparably large grain-size. 
This issue has been often discussed on the example 
of the adjective good (cf. Katz 1972, Pustejovsky 1995). 
We deliberately settle on a grain size of description 
coarser than the most detailed semantic analysis possi- 
ble (4). 
(4) (good 
(good-Adj 1 
(CAT adj) 
(SYN- STRUC 
(1 ((root $varl) 
(cat n) 
(mods ((root $vatO))))) 
(2 ((root $var0) 
(eat adj) 
(subj ((root Svarl) 
(cat n)))))) 
(SEM-STRUC 
(LEX-MAP 
(attitude 
(type evaluative) 
(attitude-value (value (>0.75)) 
(relaxable-to (value (>0.6)))) 
2 Derived from Tarski's and Katz's effability princi- 
ple (Tarski 1956: 19-21; Katz 1978: 209) and extended 
to NLE 
(scope ^$varl) 
(attributed-to *speaker*)))))) 
The finest grain-size analysis requires that a certain 
salient property of the modified noun is contextually 
selected as the one on which the meaning of the noun 
and that of the adjective is colmected. In our approach, 
the representation solution for good would be to intro- 
duce an evaluation attitude, with a high value and 
scoped over this property. Salient properties are, how- 
ever, hard to identify formally, as is well known, for 
instance, in the scholarslfip on metaphor, where salience 
is the determining factor for the similarity dimension on 
whicll metaphors (,and similes) are based, It is, therefore, 
wise to avoid having to search for the salient property, 
and the principle of practical effability offers a justifica- 
tion for tiffs. 
4. Non-Property-Based Adjectival 
Modification 
This section contains a brief discussion of the senmntic 
treatment of adjectives which cannot be reduced to the 
standard property-based type of adjectival modification. 
This discussion illustrates an important point in our 
approach, namely, that syntactic modification does not 
necessarily imply semantic modification. 
4.1 Attitudes 
Good is, of course, a scalar. Nevertheless, unlike in the 
case of big (2), the LEX-MAP for (4) does not contain a 
property-value pair that can be attached to the frame of 
tile modified noun like house in tile TMR. Instead, the 
meaning representation of good introduces an attitude 
on the part of the speaker with regard to the modified 
noun. In the TMR, the attitudes characterize the whole 
proposition, and thus the semantic link between the 
modified noun and the adjective is weakened.There are 
other types of adjectives which challenge the conunon- 
sense view that the memfing of the adjective somehow 
"amalgamates" with the memfing of the modified noun, 
and most of these types are non-scalar or only margin- 
ally scalar. 
4.2 Temporal Adjectives 
The purely temporal knowledge in MikroKosmos is 
recorded with the meaning of the entire proposition, and 
adjective entries are not marked for it. Some temporal 
adjectives, of file kind that Levi presents as derived from 
adverbs rather than nouns (examples (1.9) in Levi 1978: 
7, repeated here as 5), are analyzed in a different manner 
844 
precisely because they do not modify semantically the 
nouns they modify syntactically--in other words, the 
temporal meaning of the adjective characterizes the 
proposition. Thus, occasional visitor (5iii) is analyzed 
as a rhetorical paraphrase of visit occasionally. 
(5) (i) former roommate 
(ii) early riser 
(iii) occasional visitor 
(iv) eventual compromise 
4.3 Membership adjectives 
Tim membership class has been largely ignored in the 
literature. There has been a sporadic interest in the 
adjective fake (see Iw,'mska 1995--cf. Raskin 1981) 
because it clearly violates the silnplistic subset-forming 
notion of adjective meaning, such that red houses are a 
subset of all houses. But there are many other adjectives 
which use exactly the same type of lexical entry, and 
their similarity to each other and to fake had not been 
noticed before. 
The most typical adjectives in the member subclass 
are authentic (6),fake (7), and nominal (8). Many others 
are their synonyms and near-synonyms. The lexical 
entry for Otis subclass focuses on two major elements: 
first, wheflmr tile modified norm is a member of a certain 
set--anthentic and nominal members ,are but fake mem- 
bers are not; and, second, whether the properties of tiffs 
noun intersect significantly with those of tile set mem- 
bers--the properties of authentic members overlap with 
the common properties of the set meinbers on most 
import,'mt properties; the properties of fake members 
overlap with those of the set members only on unimpor- 
tant properties, such as physical resembl,'mce--e.g.fake 
gun; and the properties of nominal members overlap 
more significantly with those of the set members bat not 
on the most important ones. 
The first element is represented ill a set notation: setl 
shows that ^$varl belongs to the set, whose typical 
member is denoted by a variable refseml, in tile ease of 
authentic and nominal but not in file case of fake. Set2 is 
the set of ,all properties of the members of setl; set3 is 
tile set of all properties of ^$var 1; set4 is, essentially, the 
intersection of set2 and set3. 
The second element is represented as the value of a 
saliency (importance) attitude to the intersection 
between the properties of the modified noun and those 
of the set members it is purported to belong to: the 
saliency v~due is 1.0 for authentic, still lfigh for nominal, 
and low for fake. This representation is based on the 
assumption that functioning as a member, which differ- 
entiates between authentic and nominal, in that the 
former does ,'rod tile latter does not function as a mem- 
ber should, is the most salient featttre, while sometlfing 
like physical similarity (a fake gun only looks like a 
gun) is the least salient one. (7) and (8) below are shown 
only partially, where they conWast with (6). 
(6) (authentic 
(authentic-Adj 1 
CA'\[" adj) 
(SEM-STRUC 
(I.F2(-MAP 
((1 2) (setl 
(member refseml) ;refsem X are vari- 
(member ^$varl)) ;ables not used by 
(set2 ;the linking process 
(member refseml.*)) ;"*" means all 
(set3 ;properties in a 
(member ^$varl.*)) ;a concept 
(set 4 
(member (AND (set2.member 
set3.member)))) 
(attitude 
(type salience) 
(attitude-value 1.0) 
(scope set4 
(attributed-to *speaker *))))))) 
(7) (fake 
(fake-Adjl 
((1 2)(setl 
(member refsem 1) 
((member ^$varl) 
(polarity negative))) 
(attitude-value (value (< 0.25))) 
(8) (nominal 
(nominal-Adjl 
(attitude-value (wdue (< 0.75))) 
4.4 Event-Related Adjectives 
To derive file semantic part of ,'m adjectival entry from a 
vel'b,'fl entry, first one must identify the case, or thematic 
role (such as agent, theme, beueficiary, etc.) filled by the 
nolal modifiexl by the adjective ill qnesfion. We illustrate 
this process using file lexical entries for abusive and 
abuse. The superentry for abuse includes at least three 
senses, roughly, abuse-V1 "insult verbally" abuse-V2 
'violate a law or a privilege" and abuse-V3 'assault 
physically" ,'rod the adjective may be derived from any 
one of them. What is abusive is either file event (E) 
itself, as ill abusive speech or abusive behavior, or the 
agent (A) of the event, its in abusive man or abusive 
neighbor. AbusivelE is then tile eventive sense of the 
adjective formed from abuse-V1 (9), and abusive is 1A 
the agentive sense of the adjective in the same sense of 
abuse. The difference between file two is, essentially, in 
the position of ^$varl in the LEX-MAI' and ill the scope 
of atlribntion of the two attitudes inherited from file ver- 
bal entry. Natla'aUy, file adjective entries replace the ver- 
bal SYN- STRUC below wifll the standard Adj one (see 
845 
(1) above--for more data and discussion see also Raskin 
and Nirenburg 1996). 
(9) (abuse 
(abuse-V 1 
(CAT V) 
(SYN- STRUC 
((root Svar0) 
(cat v) 
(subj ((root $varl) 
(eat n)) 
(obj ((root Svar2) 
(cat n)))))) 
(SEM-STRUC 
(LEX-MAP 
(communicative- event 
(agent (value ^$varl) 
(sere human)) 
(benef (value ^$var2) 
(sem human)) 
(theme (value refseml)) 
(attitudel 
(type evaluative) 
(attitude-value (value (< 0.25))) 
(scope refsem 1) 
(attributed-to (OR (^$var'2 speaker)))) 
(attitude2 
(type evaluative) 
(attitude-value (value (< 0.25))) 
(scope ^$var2) 
(attributed-to ^$varl)))))) 
4.5 Relative (Denominal) Adjectives 
Relalive adjectives ,are denourinal, object-related, in 
their meaning. The following example illustrates the 
connection between nominal mid adjectival meanings. 
(10) (i) (medicine 
(medicine-Nl) 
(CAT n) 
(SYN-STRUC 
(root Svar0) 
(cat n))) 
(SEM-STRUC 
(LEX-MAP 
medicine)))) 
(ii) (medical 
(medicabAdj) 
(CA'Fad j) 
(SEM-STRUC 
(L~X-MAP 
(^Swirl 
(pertain-to medicine)))))) 
As file default property connecting file modifier to 
the modifiexl, the MikroKosmos analyzer uses file catch- 
all relation PERTAIN-TO. We have identified several morn 
specific relations. 
The frst such relation is OWNED-BY, as in federal- 
Adjl in the sense of "owned by a federation." Another 
specific relation is HAS-AS-PART, as in malignant-Adj3 
in the sense of containing cancer cells. LOCATION is also 
a conunon relation, as in international-Adj 1, "taking 
place in a set of two or more comltries." It is interesting 
that another sense of international utilizes the OWNED- 
BY property noted above, as in "owned by a set of two or 
more countries;' and yet another combines LOCATION 
with event-relatedness, as in "manufactured in a set of 
two or more eounlries." 
The disambiguation mnong such multiple senses is 
not a simple matter, and in an unusual contraposition to 
the standard semantic problem of infinite polysemy, a 
move up, rather than down, to the undifferentiated 
generic meaning of an adjective like international is rec- 
ommended in case of disambiguation problems. In other 
words, while we continue to discover more specific rela- 
tions between the lexical entries of denominal adjectives 
mid the nouns they are derived from, file generic PER- 
TAIN-TO property should not be discarded. This move is, 
again, related to file issue of grain-size of semantic 
description. 
5. Adjectives and Other Modifiers 
The MikroKosmos analyzer treats modification by 
attempting to merge the meanings of the modifiers into 
the meanings of the modified. For those modifiers 
whose memfings are (possibly, sets of) property-value 
pairs, the method is to insert file values riley carry into 
file same property slot in the modified. For inst,'mcc, file 
sense of smooth as in smooth silk will be a r,'mge on file 
TEXTURE scale. If TEXTURE is defined as a property of 
PIIYSICAL-OBJECF or MATERIAL, and SILK is a descen- 
dent of either of them, then the v',duc carried in the lexi- 
con entry for smooth will be inserted by the analyzer as 
the TEXTURE property value for file instance of silk in 
tim TMR. 
Our apwoach covers ,all property modification in lan- 
guage, not only adjective-noun combinations. Thus, it 
would be applicable to noun-noun combinations, 
adverb-verb combinations and other mollification situa- 
tions, as illustrated in (11): 
(11) Modified Modifiers 
Verb Adverb, Noun, Prepositional Phrase 
Noun Adjective, Prepositional Phra~ 
Adjective Adverb, Prepositional Phrase 
Adverb Adverb 
The most challenging cases in all kinds of modifica- 
tion would be those where syntactic dependency does 
not i~redeternfine semantic dependency. In lhis pawr we 
have illustrated a method, based on ontology and text 
memfing representation, of lreating such discretxmcies 
in dependency for adjectiwd modification. This method 
886 
has been tested in the MikroKosmos semantic analyzer 
based on the iexical entries for 6,000 Spanish mid 1,500 
English adjectives. 
The method is based on the discovery of a small 
number of basic types of adjectival lexical entries and its 
nse, with minor modifications, with a l~wge number of 
specific lexical entries, thus nmking tile acquisition of 
adjectives cognitively easier, faster, and cheaper. Each 
type of lexical entry (lctennines a type of mtxlilication 
relationship between the adjective ~md the kind of nouns 
it modifies, most significantly, whether this relationslfip 
is property-based or not-property-based. We have also 
discovered that this approach to adjectival me,ruing is 
language-independent: what varies from language to 
language is the adjectival superentries, i.e., the various 
combinations of different meanings of the same adjec- 
tive, as well as adjectival availability for a certain metal- 
ing. i.e., whether a specific meaning c,'m Ire expressed 
adjectivally in a language. Most adjectiwd meanings of 
one language are, however, expressed adjectiwdly as 
well in another language, and the lexical entry for this 
me,ruing is then unchanged. 
In m,'my languages, adjectives and adverbs are the 
sanle. Is our approach to adjectival moditication of 
holms applicable to adverhi~d mcxlilication of ved~s? Ini- 
tial research shows that the property-/non-l~roperty- 
based dichotomy holds there as well. We intend to test 
the hypothesis flint this method extrapolates to ~dl the 
above types of modification as well. 
Acknowledgments 
The research reported in this paper was suplxJrtcd by 
Contract MDA904-92-C-5189 with the U.S. Depart- 
ment of Defense. Victor Raskin is gratefid to Purdue 
University for pemfitting him to consult CRL/NMSU on 
the MikroKosmos project. Both authors feel indebted to 
the other members of the MikroKosmos team. 
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847 
