A central issue in work on modifier ordering is how to order modifiers that are unobserved during system development. English has upwards of 200,000 words, with over 50,000 words in the vocabulary of an educated adult (Aitchison, 2003). Up to a quarter of these words may be adjectives, which poses a significant problem for any system that attempts to categorize English adjectives in ways that are useful for an ordering task. Extensive in-context observation of adjectives and other modifiers is required to 1 Introduction adequately characterize their behavior. .
