An Empirical Approach to the Interpretation of Superlatives

In this paper we introduce an empirical approach to the semantic interpretation of superlative adjectives. We present a corpus annotated for superlatives and propose an interpretation algorithm that uses a wide-coverage parser and produces semantic representations. We achieve Fscores between 0.84 and 0.91 for detecting attributive superlatives and an accuracy in the range of 0.69–0.84 for determining the correct comparison set. As far as we are aware, this is the first automated approach to superlatives for open-domain texts and questions.