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<Paper uid="W03-1314">
  <Title>Exploring adjectival modification in biomedical discourse across two genres</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Background
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Adjectival modification as well as lexical semantics of adjectives has been studied extensively in the linguistic and NLP literature. Most approaches have been directed at creating adjective taxonomies and other ways of classifying and representing adjectives according to their properties and function. Raskin and Niernburg (1995) provide a comprehensive overview of the various approaches that have been taken to description, classification and representation of adjectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> From the NLP standpoint, Fellbaum (1993) partitions adjectives in WordNet(r) 1 into two large classes: descriptive and relational. Descriptive adjectives &amp;quot;ascribe a value of an attribute to a noun&amp;quot; (p.27) (i.e., big child) while relational adjectives are usually derived from and are somehow associated with a noun (i.e., musical child). Another prominent distinction has to do with whether an adjective can express continuous (scalar) or discrete (non-scalar) values. Raskin and Niernburg (1996) point out that for text meaning representa-</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> tion for computational semantics, the most important distinction to make is between scalar and nonscalar. They also present a method for incorporating the semantics of the modifier adjective into the semantics of the modified noun by representing nouns as frames with elements such as ATTRIBUTE_SIZE than can be filled in by the semantic content of the modifying adjectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The major contribution of this study is to explore adjectival modification across two genres in the biomedical domain. Our approach is essentially practical and oriented towards applied perspectives. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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