What determines the order of adjectives in English? Comparing efficiency-based theories using dependency treebanks

What it is about

The paper asks what fixes the order of prenominal adjectives in English, as in "big blue box". It implements four efficiency-based predictors: subjectivity, from crowd ratings of 398 adjectives; information locality; integration cost; and a new predictor, information gain. Each predictor scores an adjective pair, and the test is accuracy in predicting the order of held-out AAN triples, estimated from an automatically parsed Common Crawl subsection with a 155-triple test set from the English Web Treebank. The predictors are comparable in accuracy. With word forms, subjectivity and PMI do best; with word clusters, subjectivity is best and information gain close behind. A logistic model shows two broad factors: a semantic one (subjectivity or cluster-based information gain) and a word-form one (PMI).

Ideas

• I1. Adjective order in en/src/lin.rs: order prenominal adjectives by a subjectivity score from Mova's own lexicon rating (not the paper's crowd data), and measure accuracy on the 155 EWT AAN triples (test only) against the current rule in lin.rs.
• I2. A PMI feature from Mova's own silver corpus (amod counts from corpus/), added to the adjective class in world; measure accuracy with cv on train. Common Crawl stays out, for size and licence.
• I3. Two-factor check: fit the paper's two-predictor logistic model on our own AAN triples and report whether the order chosen by lin.rs fits it; the answer decides whether a fixed rule or a learned scorer is the next step.

For Mova

The order generator is en/src/lin.rs, the lexicon and class of adjectives is in world, and the corpus counts are in corpus/. The chapters are 10. Word classes for adjectives and 22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases for the noun phrase. Measure first the accuracy of the current lin.rs rule on the 155 EWT AAN triples.

Topics: Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.181

@inproceedings{futrell2020what,
  title = {{What determines the order of adjectives in English? Comparing efficiency-based theories using dependency treebanks}},
  author = {Futrell, Richard and Dyer, William and Scontras, Greg},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.181},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.181}
}

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