Lexical Inference and the Problem of the Long Tail

No one's semantic lexicon is ever complete. People cope through the adroit use of context. Machines should do the same. In this position paper I suggest that a large part of this context consists of deep knowledge about adjectives, adverbials, and other linguistic forms whose meaning cuts across subject domains. This is a new direction for research that complements the large effort on ontology induction and could accelerate work on reading for reasoning.