Adverbs Revisited: Enhancing WordNet Coverage of Adverbs with a Supersense Taxonomy

Jooyoung Lee, Jader Martins Camboim de Sá, Cedric Pruski


Abstract
WordNet offers rich supersense hierarchies for nouns and verbs, yet adverbs remain underdeveloped, lacking a systematic semantic classification. We introduce a linguistically grounded supersense typology for adverbs, empirically validated through annotation, that captures major semantic domains including manner, temporal, frequency, degree, domain, speaker-oriented, and subject-oriented functions. Results from a pilot annotation study demonstrate that these categories provide broad coverage of adverbs in natural text and can be reliably assigned by human annotators. Incorporating this typology extends WordNet’s coverage, aligns it more closely with linguistic theory, and facilitates downstream NLP applications such as word sense disambiguation, event extraction, sentiment analysis, and discourse modeling. We present the proposed supersense categories, annotation outcomes, and directions for future work.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.382
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
4872–4880
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-382
DOI:
10.63317/3usz5zfjpmqu
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jooyoung Lee, Jader Martins Camboim de Sá, and Cedric Pruski. 2026. Adverbs Revisited: Enhancing WordNet Coverage of Adverbs with a Supersense Taxonomy. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4872–4880, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Adverbs Revisited: Enhancing WordNet Coverage of Adverbs with a Supersense Taxonomy (Lee et al., LREC 2026)
Copy Citation: