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arXiv · 2003.08437

A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Adpositions are frequent markers of semantic relations, but they are highly ambiguous and vary significantly from language to language. Moreover, there is a dearth of annotated corpora for investigating the cross-linguistic variation of adposition semantics, or for building multilingual disambiguation systems. This paper presents a corpus in which all adpositions have been semantically annotated in Mandarin Chinese; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first Chinese corpus to be broadly annotated with adposition semantics. Our approach adapts a framework that defined a general set of supersenses according to ostensibly language-independent semantic criteria, though its development focused primarily on English prepositions (Schneider et al., 2018). We find that the supersense categories are well-suited to Chinese adpositions despite syntactic differences from English. On a Mandarin translation of The Little Prince, we achieve high inter-annotator agreement and analyze semantic correspondences of adposition tokens in bitext.

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Siyao Peng, Yang Liu, Yilun Zhu, Austin Blodgett, Yushi Zhao, Nathan Schneider. 2020-03-18. A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08437

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