Work

BERT Knows Punta Cana is not just beautiful, it’s gorgeous: Ranking Scalar Adjectives with Contextualised Representations

Year: 2020

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Adjectives like pretty, beautiful and gorgeous describe positive properties of the nouns they modify but with different intensity. These differences are important for natural language understanding and reasoning. We propose a novel BERT-based approach to intensity detection for scalar adjectives. We model intensity by vectors directly derived from contextualised representations and show they can successfully rank scalar adjectives. We evaluate our models both intrinsically, on gold standard datasets, and on an Indirect Question Answering task. Our results demonstrate that BERT encodes rich knowledge about the semantics of scalar adjectives, and is able to provide better quality intensity rankings than static embeddings and previous models with access to dedicated resources.

Source: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.598

Authors: Aina Garí Soler, Marianna Apidianaki

Institution: Université Paris-Saclay

Language: English

Topic: Topic Modeling

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: European Commission, Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Awards: G4459410915, G5420063140, Advanced Models for Multilingual Semantic Processing