Connecting Adverbs

[jmccrae]

Following from the goal of #172 in connecting OEWN, this issue describes a plan for the red-haired stepchild of OEWN, that is the adverbs. There are currently no synset links with adverbs (only links on the members). This is further complicated by there being no such thing as an adverb (or more accurately 'adverb' is a catch-all category covering a variety of word functions).

I did an initial sample and most of the adverbs currently in OEWN are strongly related to adjectives (77%), generally formed from adjectives by adding a '-ly' suffix or with the same form and meaning 'in a XXX manner'. For these I propose adding a new link manner linking adjectives to adverbs.

The next largest group of adverbs is that modify verb and indicate the time, manner or place of an action, but are not also adjectives (11%). Examples of these include 'away', 'inside out', 'everywhere', 'apart'. I would suggest that we can build a hypernym hierarchy for these, with 'sometime', 'somehow' and 'somewhere' as the top synsets.

The remaining adverbs fall into the following categories

• Adjectival modifiers (4%): Words such as 'most', 'partly', 'very' which modify an adjective
• Discourse markers (4%): Words such as 'so', 'henceforth' that modify the clause and indicate something about the discourse flow
• Idiomatic Phrases (2%): Such as 'and then some' and 'for the asking'. I am not sure that these should be in WordNet at all as they are quite compositional.
• Particles (2%): Such as 'not' and 'each'. These are basically closed-class words (see Include closed part of speech classes #818) that perform specific grammatical functions and are not really similar to other adverbs.

For these I would simply add an exemplifies links from an appropriate noun synset, e.g., introducing a new synset for 'adjectival modifier' as a hyponym of 'adverb'