Fuzzy lexical acquisition of adjectives

This paper details a method for detecting senses (meaning) of entries for an English lexicon. The examples are based on size adjectives within a semantic-based natural language processing system such as the Ontological Semantic Technology system described in [1] and developed and improved elsewhere [2]-[6]. The method attempts to calculate the approximate meaning of unknown words. For the described case of adjectives, the system observes what properties the modified nouns have. Then, specific instances of the adjective are tracked via a set of determiners from [7] to find out whether the unknown adjective adjusts size to bigger or smaller than average. At the end of any step, a partially completed entry is created for the user to rectify and finalize. The method demonstrates its feasibility of generalization to other properties corresponding to adjectives and, potentially, other parts of speech.