Idea
Let's fetch pre-trained word embeddings and use word vector arithmetic properties to get the set of words that are semantically similar to our target word, then choose the most promising ones:

But we'll try to exploit adjective - adverb relationships.
Code
First, you need to download the word embeddings. I usually take GloVe from Stanford. Then you need to convert GloVe text format to Gensim with:
$ python -m gensim.scripts.glove2word2vec -i glove.6B.100d.txt -o glove-word2vec.6B.100d.txt
2018-01-13 09:54:04,133 : MainThread : INFO : running /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gensim/scripts/glove2word2vec.py -i glove.6B.100d.txt -o glove-word2vec.6B.100d.txt
2018-01-13 09:54:04,248 : MainThread : INFO : converting 400000 vectors from glove.6B.100d.txt to glove-word2vec.6B.100d.txt
2018-01-13 09:54:04,622 : MainThread : INFO : Converted model with 400000 vectors and 100 dimensions
After that loading is fairly easy:
from gensim.models.keyedvectors import KeyedVectors
glove_filename = '../../_data/nlp/glove/glove-word2vec.6B.100d.txt'
model = KeyedVectors.load_word2vec_format(glove_filename, binary=False)
print(model.most_similar(positive=['woman', 'king'], negative=['man']))
This test should output semantically similar words to a woman
that a like king
to a man
:
(u'queen', 0.7698541283607483)
(u'monarch', 0.6843380928039551)
(u'throne', 0.6755735874176025)
(u'daughter', 0.6594556570053101)
(u'princess', 0.6520534753799438)
Finally, this is how we can navigate to the closest adverbs:
from difflib import SequenceMatcher
def close_adv(input, num=5, model_topn=50):
positive = [input, 'happily']
negative = [ 'happy']
all_similar = model.most_similar(positive, negative, topn=model_topn)
def score(candidate):
ratio = SequenceMatcher(None, candidate, input).ratio()
looks_like_adv = 1.0 if candidate.endswith('ly') else 0.0
return ratio + looks_like_adv
close = sorted([(word, score(word)) for word, _ in all_similar], key=lambda x: -x[1])
return close[:num]
print(close_adv('strong'))
print(close_adv('notable'))
print(close_adv('high'))
print(close_adv('quick'))
print(close_adv('terrible'))
print(close_adv('quiet'))
The result is not ideal, but looks pretty promising:
[(u'strongly', 1.8571428571428572), (u'slowly', 1.3333333333333333), (u'increasingly', 1.3333333333333333), (u'sharply', 1.3076923076923077), (u'largely', 1.3076923076923077)]
[(u'notably', 1.8571428571428572), (u'principally', 1.3333333333333333), (u'primarily', 1.25), (u'prominently', 1.2222222222222223), (u'chiefly', 1.1428571428571428)]
[(u'rapidly', 1.1818181818181819), (u'briefly', 1.1818181818181819), (u'steadily', 1.1666666666666667), (u'dangerously', 1.1333333333333333), (u'continuously', 1.125)]
[(u'quickly', 1.8333333333333335), (u'quietly', 1.5), (u'briskly', 1.3333333333333333), (u'furiously', 1.2857142857142856), (u'furtively', 1.2857142857142856)]
[(u'horribly', 1.625), (u'heroically', 1.4444444444444444), (u'silently', 1.375), (u'uncontrollably', 1.3636363636363638), (u'stoically', 1.3529411764705883)]
[(u'quietly', 1.8333333333333335), (u'silently', 1.4615384615384617), (u'patiently', 1.4285714285714286), (u'discreetly', 1.4), (u'fitfully', 1.3076923076923077)]
Of course, you can go on with a better way to check for adverb, use nltk.edit_distance
to measure word similarity, etc, etc. So this is just an idea and it's kind of probabilistic, but it looks interesting to me.