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A Study of Nominal Verbs in Modern Chinese Based on Shannon-Wiener Index——Case Studies on “Bianhua” Words

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13495))

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Abstract

Part of speech (POS) has always been a significant problem in Chinese grammar research, and the research on nominal verbs is especially hot and complicated. It not only relates to the establishment of dictionary sense, but also involves the specification of POS tagging in language knowledge engineering, which is of great significance. Based on the concept of “entropy” in information theory, this paper applies Shannon-Weiner index, a measurement tool of information diversity, to linguistic research, which is called “word pluripotency index”. At the same time, based on the BCC corpus of Beijing Language and Culture University, this paper studies the lexical pluripotency of five words under the “变化(Bianhua, change)” sense category. The experimental results demonstrate that the word pluripotency indexes of these words are all bigger than 0.6, and reveal the uniformity of word distribution under different word classes and the degree of verb-to-noun shifting. This paper also explores the significance of the word pluripotency index to the establishment of dictionary sense and the tagging of word class.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bian(变)① refers to the same dictionary sense as Bian(变).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of CLSW 2022 for helpful suggestions and comments. This work is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for National Language Committee Research Program of China (No. ZDI135-141).

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Correspondence to Lijiao Yang .

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Chen, S., Yang, L., Zhou, J. (2023). A Study of Nominal Verbs in Modern Chinese Based on Shannon-Wiener Index——Case Studies on “Bianhua” Words. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13495. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28953-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28953-8_5

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