Feature Norms

Feature norms are short descriptions of typical attributes for a set of objects. They often describe the visual appearance (a firetruck is red), function or purpose (a cup holds liquid), location (mushrooms grow in forests), and relationships between objects (a cheetah is a cat). The underlying features are usually elicited by asking a subject to carefully describe a cue object, and recording their responses. The quantification of the resulting object-feature pairs is called feature norms.

We collected feature norms for a set of 572 concrete, depictable German nouns, comprising 244 noun-noun compounds and their corresponding constituents. For example, we include features for Schneeball (snowball), Schnee (snow), and Ball (ball).

Stephen Roller, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Feature Norms of German Noun Compounds
In: Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Multiword Expressions. Gothenborg, Sweden, April 2014.

The feature norms are freely available for education, research and other non-commercial purposes. Please contact the SemRel group to obtain the database.