The Chinese Aspect Generation Based on Aspect Selection Functions

Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th IJCNLP of the AFNLP, pages 629–637, Suntec, Singapore, 2-7 August 2009. c⃝2009 ACL and AFNLP The Chinese Aspect Generation Based on Aspect Selection Functions Guowen Yang The Institute of linguistics Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 5 Jianguomennei Dajie, 100732 Beijing P.R.China John A. Bateman FB10, Sprach und Literaturwissenschaften Bremen University 28334 Germany bateman@uni-bremen.de kybeijing@yahoo.com Abstract This paper describes our system for generating Chinese aspect expressions. In the system, the semantics of different aspects is characterized by specific temporal and conceptual features. The semantic applicability conditions of each individual aspect are theoretically represented by an aspect selection function (ASF). The generation is realized by evaluating implemented inquiries which formally define the ASFs, traversing the grammatical network, and making aspect selections. 1 Introduction Aspect is one of the most controversial topics among linguists and philosophers. Unlike the function of tense, which relates the time of situation to a deictic center, aspects are different ways of viewing the states of a situation with respect to the situation’s internal temporal constituency (Yang, 2007). This paper describes our system for generating Chinese aspect expressions. The aspect forms covered in the present research were derived from a corpus analysis. The main task of the aspect research from a computational perspective is to implement computationally both the semantic interpretations and the grammatical realizations of aspects as formulated in theoretical work. The theoretical principle of this is, to a large extent, based on Montague’s intensional logic (Montague, 1970; Dowty, 1979; Bestougeff and Ligozat, 1992, Portner and Partee, 2002). It is held that the goal of semantics is to present the truth conditions for each well formed sentence. In previous studies there are some fruitful experiments on computationally processing temporal information in Chinese, e.g. Lee and Hsu’s Chinese to English machine translation system (1990), Li, Wong, and Yuan’s temporal information-extraction system (2001), Xue’s machine learning system (2008), and Xue, Zhong & Chen’s tense annotation system (2008). However, a systematic investigation, including the implementation of the semantics of aspects, has rarely been carried out before and is one of the main contributions of the present research. Aspects are determined by both situation types, which build specific situation structures, and particular viewpoints that construct specific temporal relations between the viewing points and the internal temporal constituencies of situations. These two kinds of factors, which influence aspect selections, can be characterized by aspectual features. This makes it possible for us to use a function which takes relevant time points and concepts as its parameters and “calculates” the truth value of the semantic applicability conditions of a specific aspect in order to make a corresponding aspect selection in language generation. We term this function the Aspect Selection Function (ASF). The ASFs are used for the theoretical descriptions of the aspects and, at the same time, they are the basis for our computational implementation of the semantics of the aspects. Our system has been implemented as a grammar for the KPML multilingual …

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