Sorting of Numeric Values Using an Identification of Superlative Adjectives

A method, in a data processing system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory, the at least one memory comprising instructions executed by the at least one processor to cause the at least one processor to implement a cognitive system for sorting of numeric values utilizing an identification of superlative adjectives, wherein the cognitive system operates to:

• for a set of adjectives A and a set of nouns N identified from a corpus:
• for each term, determining, by the cognitive system, a first indication of whether each adjective a in a set of adjectives A is to modify the term, wherein the term is a noun n in the set of nouns N;
• determining, by the cognitive system, a second indication of whether each noun n in the set of nouns N is to modify each adjective a in the set of adjectives A;
• using the first indication and the second indication, determining, by the cognitive system, a third indication of whether each noun n in the set of nouns N is to be modified by either a maximum or minimum superlative adjective;
• determining, by the cognitive system, whether the third indication is greater than or equal to a predetermined threshold;
• and
• responsive to the third indication being greater than or equal to the predetermined threshold, identifying, by the cognitive system, the adjective a that modifies the noun n as a superlative adjective ai and as either a maximum or a minimum superlative adjective in a set of maximum or minimum superlative adjectives;
• and
• providing, by the cognitive system, the set of maximum or minimum superlative adjectives to a question decomposition stage or hypothesis generation stage of the cognitive system for sorting of the numeric values.