This paper describes two methods for checking the acceptability of adjective deletion in noun phrases. The first method uses the Google n-gram corpus to check the fluency of the remaining context after an adjective is removed. The second method trains an SVM model using n-gram counts and other measures to classify deletable and undeletable adjectives in context. Both methods are evaluated against human judgements of sentence naturalness. The application motivating our interest in adjective

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... ion is data hiding, in particular linguistic steganography. We demonstrate the proposed adjective deletion technique can be integrated into an existing stegosystem, and in addition we propose a novel secret sharing scheme based on adjective deletion.