Lexicon of English Verbal Polarity Shifters

We provide a complete lexicon of English verbal polarity shifters and their shifting scope. Our lexicon covers all verbs of WordNet v3.1 that are single word or particle verbs. Polarity shifter and scope labels are given for each lemma-synset pair (i.e. each word sense of a lemma).

Data

The data is presented in the following forms:

1. A complete lexicon of all verbal shifters and their shifting scopes.
2. Two auxiliary lists:
   1. A list of all lemmas with shifter labels
   2. A list of all word senses with shifter labels

All files are in CSV (comma-separated value) format.

1. Main Lexicon

File name: shifter_lexicon.csv

The main lexicon lists all verbal shifters and their shifting scopes. Verbal shifters are modelled as lemma-sense pairs with one or more shifting scopes.

Each line of the lexicon file contains a single lemma-sense-scope triple, using the format:

LEMMA,SYNSET,SCOPE

The elements are defined as follows:

• LEMMA: The lemma form of the verb.
• SYNSET: The numeric identifier of the synset, commonly referred to as offset or database location. It consists of 8 digits, including leading zeroes (e.g. 00334568).
• SCOPE: The scope of the shifting:
  • subj: The verbal shifter affects its subject.
  • dobj: The verbal shifter affects its direct object.
  • pobj_*: The verbal shifter affects objects within a prepositional phrase. The preposition in question is included in the annotation. For example a from-preposition scope receives the label pobj_from and a a for-preposition receives pobj_for.
  • comp: The verbal shifter affects a clausal complement, such as infinitive clauses or gerunds.

The lexicon lists all lemma-sense pairs that are verbal shifters. Any lemma-sense pair not listed is not a verbal shifter. When a lemma-sense pair has more than one possible scope, a separate entry is made for each scope.

2. Auxiliary Lists

The auxiliary files represent the same shifter information as the main lexicon, but for lemmas and synsets, respectively, instead of for lemma-sense pairs. Due to their nature, these lists are more coarse-grained than the main lexicon and contain no information on shifter scope. They are provided as a convenience for fast experimentation.

2.1. List of Lemmas

File name: shifter_lemma_lexicon.csv

List of all verb lemmas and whether they are shifters in at least one of their word senses.

LEMMA,LABEL

• LEMMA: The lemma form of the verb.
• LABEL: shifter if the verb is a shifter in at least one of its word senses, otherwise nonshifter.

Many verbal shifter lemmas only cause shifting in some of their word senses. This list is therefore considerably more coarse-grained than the main lexicon.

2.2. List of Synsets

File name: shifter_synset_lexicon.csv

List of all synsets and whether their lemmas are shifters in this specific word sense.

SYNSET,LABEL

• SYNSET: The numeric identifier of the synset, commonly referred to as offset or database location. It consists of 8 digits, including leading zeroes (e.g. 00334568).
• LABEL: shifter if the word sense causes shifting, otherwise nonshifter.

Shifting is shared among lemmas of the same word sense. This list, therefore, provides (almost) the same granularity for the shifter label as the main lexicon. However, in a few exceptions, synsets contained words with subtly different senses that did not all cause shifting. These senses are considered shifters in this list, analogous to the generalisation in the list of lemmas.

Attribution

This dataset was created as part of the following publication:

Schulder, Marc and Wiegand, Michael and Ruppenhofer, Josef and Köser, Stephanie (2018). "Introducing a Lexicon of Verbal Polarity Shifters for English". Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Miyazaki, Japan, May 7-12, 2018. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3365683.

If you use the data in your research or work, please cite the publication.