On the Distinctive Co-occurrence Characteristics of Antonymy
This work addresses a gap in lexical semantics for researchers by providing a comparative analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on prior studies of antonym co-occurrence.
The study tackled the problem of determining whether the co-occurrence pattern of antonym pairs in text is distinctive compared to other semantic relations, and found that antonymy is distinctive in terms of high co-occurrence strength, preferred linear order, and short spans.
Antonymy has long received particular attention in lexical semantics. Previous studies have shown that antonym pairs frequently co-occur in text, across genres and parts of speech, more often than would be expected by chance. However, whether this co-occurrence pattern is distinctive of antonymy remains unclear, due to a lack of comparison with other semantic relations. This work fills the gap by comparing antonymy with three other relations across parts of speech using robust co-occurrence metrics. We find that antonymy is distinctive in three respects: antonym pairs co-occur with high strength, in a preferred linear order, and within short spans. All results are available online.