[Corpora-List] Common objects & descriptive features -- advice needed

[saket]

Hi,

I'm looking for some advice on how to approach the following problem.

I'm trying to create a "feature vector" for a list of common objects.
For example, for a "banana" I'd like to be able to say that it has an
"elongated SIZE", "yellow COLOR", "smooth TEXTURE", etc. This could
amount to looking up the object in the dictionary or WordNet and
extracting adjectives and noun phrases, but I also need to be able to
automatically infer that adjective1 corresponds to the descriptive
feature for "size", adjective2 for "color", etc. This could also be a
probabilistic construction, which says that it's "usually yellow, but
maybe also green".

Essentially, I'm trying to create a database defining objects based on
their descriptive features, which I think can be used for a variety of
tasks. Have people approached this problem before? Does there exist a
corpora which might be relevant here? What's the best dictionary to
use? Any advice?

Thanks.

Saket Navlakha
saket at cs.umd.edu

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