BERT Knows Punta Cana is not just beautiful, it's gorgeous: Ranking Scalar Adjectives with Contextualised Representations

Adjectives like pretty, beautiful and gorgeous describe positive properties\nof the nouns they modify but with different intensity. These differences are\nimportant for natural language understanding and reasoning. We propose a novel\nBERT-based approach to intensity detection for scalar adjectives. We model\nintensity by vectors directly derived from contextualised representations and\nshow they can successfully rank scalar adjectives. We evaluate our models both\nintrinsically, on gold standard datasets, and on an Indirect Question Answering\ntask. Our results demonstrate that BERT encodes rich knowledge about the\nsemantics of scalar adjectives, and is able to provide better quality intensity\nrankings than static embeddings and previous models with access to dedicated\nresources.\n