This is the kind of thing that should be picked up by statistical parsers which presumably use patterns like this to choose the "correct" parse of a sentence fr

This is the kind of thing that should be picked up by statistical parsers which presumably use patterns like this to choose the "correct" parse of a sentence from the multitude of possibilities. Of course it is more meaningful when a human points it out. The "Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose" hierarchy should enable inferences about the meaning of words which have never been seen before. It would be really interesting to see if someone could construct something like wordnet from inferences based on patterns like this.