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Developing a Syntactic and Semantic Annotation Tool for Research on Chinese Vocabulary

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Book cover Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

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

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Abstract

Syntax and semantics are of great importance for vocabulary research. Large-scale corpus-based studies concerning the syntactic and semantic features of Chinese vocabulary are needed. To fill the gap, this study develops a syntactic and semantic annotation tool based on dependency grammar, and delves into the syntax and semantics of the most frequently used disyllabic visual verb kànjiàn ‘see’ as an example. First, this study developed a syntactic and semantic annotation tool of dependency grammar. Second, this study extracted and selected simple sentences with kànjiàn from large-scale corpora. Third, the tool was used to conduct syntactic and semantic dependency tagging and manual checking. Results show that kànjiàn can appear in six types of syntactic dependencies as a dependent, namely, Head (predicate), Attribute, Coordination, Verb-Object, and Subject-Verb. Moreover, the most frequent syntactic function of kànjiàn is being a predicate, which accounts for 85.4%. The semantic roles that kànjiàn collocates with fall into five categories, which are CONTENT, EXPERIENCER, PLACE, TIME, and MANNER. The two most frequent ones are CONTENT and EXPERIENCER. Further, this paper compared the results with previous Chinese resources. The outcomes of this study prove the importance of the syntactic and semantic annotation tool in analyzing Chinese vocabulary and help us have a deep understanding of the characteristics of Chinese visual verbs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.sogou.com/labs/.

  2. 2.

    http://bcc.blcu.edu.cn/.

  3. 3.

    http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/.

  4. 4.

    The translation of these terms comes from this website: http://ltp.ai/docs/appendix.html. As we confirmed with the developer on April 26, 2022, the translations have some errors which mixed a dependency relation with the dependent in the relation. Since there is no new official translation, we only changed COO (coordinate) into COO (coordination) as it should be a noun not a verb or an adjective.

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the University of Macau (Project Number: MYRG2019-00013-FAH).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China

    Shan Wang, Xiaojun Liu & Jie Zhou

  2. Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China

    Shan Wang

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  1. Shan Wang
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  2. Xiaojun Liu
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  3. Jie Zhou
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Correspondence to Shan Wang .

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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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Wang, S., Liu, X., Zhou, J. (2022). Developing a Syntactic and Semantic Annotation Tool for Research on Chinese Vocabulary. 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_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_22

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