Annotating the Predicate-Argument Structure of Chinese Nominalizations

AbstractThis paper describes the Chinese NomBank Project, the goal of which is to annotate the predicate-argument structure of nominalized predicates in Chinese. The Chinese Nombank extends the general framework of the English and Chinese Proposition Banks to the annotation of nominalized predicates and adds a layer of semantic annotation to the Chinese Treebank. We first outline the scope of the work by discussing the markability of the nominalized predicates and their arguments. We then attempt to provide a categorization of the distribution of the arguments of nominalized predicates. We also discuss the relevance of the event/result distinction to the annotation of nominalized predicates and the phenomenon of incorporation. Finally we discuss some cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese.