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<Paper uid="P06-2072">
  <Title>Modeling Adjectives in Computational Relational Lexica</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="555" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> As well known, the experiment conducted by George Miller on the mental lexicon properties in the early 80s pointed out that lexical meaning is derived from a set of lexical and conceptual relations among concepts. Subsequently, a computational lexicon conceived as a semantic network has been built (the Princeton WordNet (Miller, 1990; Fellbaum, 1998)). Given its psychological plausibility and its crucial role for applications like machine translation, information retrieval and language learning systems, among many others, this relational lexicon model is being extensively adopted for machine lexical knowledge representations, playing a leading role in this field.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One of the most salient undertaking in this domain is EuroWordNet (Vossen, 1998), a multilingual database which stores wordnets for several European languages that follow the same main lines as the Princeton WordNet (Miller, 1990; Fellbaum, 1998) and are inter-related amongst them.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> EuroWordNet wordnets follow the Princeton WordNet model, but they are richer concerning both the number and the nature of conceptual relations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The work depicted here programmatically adopts the EuroWordNet framework.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In general terms, it deals with the specifications for an accurate modeling of lexical knowledge in a EuroWordNet wordnet-like database for Portuguese (WordNet.PT, henceforth), specifically focusing on the lexical semantics of adjectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Although WordNet.PT (Marrafa, 2001; Marrafa, 2002) is being developed in the general EuroWordNet framework, basic research has been carried out on Portuguese in order to guarantee the WordNet.PT accuracy. This work has already led to some changes and new directions (cf. Marrafa et al., (2006) and Amaro et al., (2006), for instance).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> In this paper we propose a small set of new relations which allow a strongly empirical motivated encoding of the major POS in Word-Net.PT, despite the fact that we particularly focus on adjectives. The empirical issues at stake are described in section 2. In section 3 we discuss the strategies adopted in previous work carried out both in WordNet and EuroWordNet frameworks, in order to make their shortcomings apparent. In section 4 we present our proposal  and argue for its relevance and soundness. Section 5 presents some results concerning the encoding of adjectives in WordNet.PT. We conclude the paper with some final remarks.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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