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Quantitative Analysis of Chinese and English Verb Valencies Based on Probabilistic Valency Pattern Theory

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13250))

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Abstract

This study examines the similarities and differences between Chinese and English verb valencies based on the Probabilistic Valency Pattern Theory (PVPT). We adopted the Parallel Universal Dependencies treebanks of Chinese and English to ensure that the comparison is under the same semantic meanings conveyed. The results show that (1) The verb valencies of both languages share similar distributions. One important difference is that Chinese has significantly more monovalent verbs (valency equals one) than English does; (2) For conveying similar meanings, Chinese adopts more verbs than English does, while the average combinatorial ability of Chinese verbs is relatively smaller; (3) The overall probabilistic valency pattern (PVP) of verbs in Chinese and English are similar; however, those of specific high-frequent verbs in Chinese and English demonstrate their own features. The findings may shed light on depicting the characteristics of Chinese and English verbs, thus facilitating studies in both linguistics and natural language processing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more information on PUD treebanks, see http://universaldependencies.org/conll17/.

  2. 2.

    The SUD treebanks can be downloaded at https://surfacesyntacticud.github.io/data/.

  3. 3.

    The diagrams were generated at https://universaldependencies.org/conllu_viewer.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jianwei Yan & Haitao Liu

Authors
  1. Jianwei Yan
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  2. Haitao Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Haitao Liu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Yanhui Gu

  3. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

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Yan, J., Liu, H. (2022). Quantitative Analysis of Chinese and English Verb Valencies Based on Probabilistic Valency Pattern Theory. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13250. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06546-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06547-7

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