Converting between adverbs and adjectives

[skarokin]

When using getAllInflections() on some adjective, the adverb forms given are the exact same as the adjective and vice versa. Is there a possible fix for this? I'm trying to generate the adjective form of adverbs and vice versa

[bjascob]

Please give specific examples of what the library gives and what you're expecting.

[skarokin]

Trying to generate the adverb form of an adjective gives the exact same results as trying to generate the different adjective forms. This is the same for adjective -> adverb

getAllInflections('quick', upos='ADV')
>>> {'RBR': ('quicker',), 'RBS': ('quickest',), 'RB': ('quick',)}
getAllInflections('quick', upos='ADJ')
>>> {'JJR': ('quicker',), 'JJS': ('quickest',), 'JJ': ('quick',)}

Is this intended?

[bjascob]

This is interesting but unfortunately I don't know the answer and there probably isn't a simple solution.

The NIH lexicon (which is where all the conversions come from) lists quick as both an ADV and an ADJ with reg variants (meaning they inflect with er and est). The word quickly is listed as a separate ADV but it is not associated with the word quick.

Doing check of the dictionary on Google, it looks like quick can be both an adjective or adverb in some instances so I'm not sure that it's even going to be possible to return a conversion from quick to quickly. Likely this is going to be limitation of the system.

[aizpy]

@bjascob The following is an analysis from Gemini:

You are absolutely correct that quick operates as a 'flat adverb' in English, and technically, quick -> quickly is a derivational process rather than an inflectional one, which explains why the NIH lexicon separates them.
However, for many practical NLP tasks, users expect derivational ADJ -> ADV conversion via -ly. A potential solution to enhance lemminflect without breaking its core NIH logic would be to introduce a secondary getDerivations() function using simple suffix rules (like -ly, -ily) or by linking to WordNet's derivationally_related_forms(), allowing users to explicitly request derivational morphology when strict inflection isn't what they're looking for.

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
# For first-time use: nltk.download('wordnet')

def get_derivational_adverb(adj_word):
    for synset in wn.synsets(adj_word, pos=wn.ADJ):
        for lemma in synset.lemmas():
            # Find adverbs derived from this adjectival morpheme
            for derived_lemma in lemma.derivationally_related_forms():
                if derived_lemma.synset().pos() == wn.ADV:
                    return derived_lemma.name()
    return None

print(get_derivational_adverb('quick'))
# Output: 'quickly'

[bjascob]

I like this idea as an enhancement. I won't have any time soon, but I'll bookmark this to look into more later on.