A Semantic Ontology of Danish Adjectives

This paper presents a semantic annotation scheme for Danish adjectives, focusing both on prototypical semantic content and semantic collocational restrictions on an adjective's head noun. The core type set comprises about 110 categories ordered in a shallow hierarchy with 14 primary and 25 secondary umbrella categories. In addition, domain information and binary sentiment tags are provided, as well as VerbNet-derived frames and semantic roles for those adjectives governing arguments. The scheme has been almost fully implemented on the lexicon of the Danish VISL parser, DanGram, containing 14,000 adjectives. We discuss the annotation scheme and its applicational perspectives, and present a statistical breakdown and coverage evaluation for three Danish reference corpora.