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The Construction and Annotation of a Semantically Enriched Database: The Mandarin VerbNet and Its NLP Applications

  • Meichun LiuEmail author
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics book series (FiCL, volume 9)

Abstract

Linguistic analysis has been questioned of its applicational value. However, with the proper framework, linguistic wisdom may be needed in the last mile of big data era. This paper introduces a lexical semantic database, Mandarin VerbNet, which is built from a frame-based constructional approach, as a linguistically motivated, computationally feasible, and Chinese-appropriate resource. The study also tests the validity of adopting the semantically-enriched and constructionally-cued features for the task of Word Sense Disambiguation. Four Chinese polysemous verbs of emotion are chosen for a pilot trial. With the annotation of frame-specific features, the different senses can be detected with a high performance rate. The results consistently show significant improvement for all the disambiguation tasks over the baselines, with the weight average F∆max. up to 0.337. The impressive results indicate the discriminative effect of frame-based constructional information, and ultimately points to the potential advantage of employing deep linguistic annotation in NLP applications.

Keywords

Mandarin VerbNet Lexical semantics Frame-based constructional approach Word sense disambiguation Linguistic annotation 

Abbreviations

ba

“把”

bei

“被”

cl

Classifier

deg

Degree marker

dur

Durative

loc

Locative

neg

Negative

pfv/perf

Perfective

sg

Singular

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Website Resources

  4. Sinica Chinese Treebank. http://treebank.sinica.edu.tw.
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Copyright information

© Peking University Press 2020

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Linguistics and TranslationCity University of Hong KongHong KongChina

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