While DBMs are able to correctly identify a small set of triples with relative features such as (skyscraper, apartment, tall) as discriminative, interpretation of relative relations requires two types of features which are not targeted by the models, namely: (i) the extraction of precise numerical reference points at scale (dealing with variations of dimensional units) and (ii) the ability to extrapolate the relations for unobserved lexemes by an explicit mechanism of comparative/transitive reasoning.
while incidental attributes can be captured as a second-order distributional phenomena, these corpora do not reflect explicit commonsense knowledge, in particular with regard to extra-linguistic phenomena.