A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5986–5994 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 5986 A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese Siyao Peng, Yang Liu, Yilun Zhu, Austin Blodgett, Yushi Zhao, Nathan Schneider Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University Washington, DC, USA {sp1184, yl879, yz565, ajb341, yz521, nathan.schneider}@georgetown.edu Abstract Adpositions are frequent markers of semantic relations, but they are highly ambiguous and vary significantly from language to language. Moreover, there is a dearth of annotated corpora for investigating the cross-linguistic variation of adposition semantics, or for building multilingual disambiguation systems. This paper presents a corpus in which all adpositions have been semantically annotated in Mandarin Chinese; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first Chinese corpus to be broadly annotated with adposition semantics. Our approach adapts a framework that defined a general set of supersenses according to ostensibly language-independent semantic criteria, though its development focused primarily on English prepositions (Schneider et al., 2018). We find that the supersense categories are well-suited to Chinese adpositions despite syntactic differences from English. On a Mandarin translation of The Little Prince, we achieve high inter-annotator agreement and analyze semantic correspondences of adposition tokens in bitext. Keywords: adpositions, supersenses, Mandarin Chinese, corpus, annotation 1. Introduction Adpositions (i.e. prepositions and postpositions) include some of the most frequent words in languages like Chinese and English, and help convey a myriad of semantic relations of space, time, causality, possession, and other domains of meaning. They are also a persistent thorn in the side of sec- ond language learners owing to their extreme idiosyncrasy (Chodorow et al., 2007; Lorincz and Gordon, 2012). For instance, the English word in has no exact parallel in an- other language; rather, for purposes of translation, its many different usages cluster differently depending on the second language. Semantically annotated corpora of adpositions in multiple languages, including parallel data, would facilitate broader empirical study of adposition variation than is pos- sible today, and could also contribute to NLP applications such as machine translation (Li et al., 2005; Agirre et al., 2009; Shilon et al., 2012; Weller et al., 2014, 2015; Hashemi and Hwa, 2014; Popovi´c, 2017) and grammatical error cor- rection (Chodorow et al., 2007; Tetreault and Chodorow, 2008; De Felice and Pulman, 2008; Hermet and Alain, 2009; Huang et al., 2016; Graën and Schneider, 2017). This paper describes the first corpus with broad-coverage an- notation of adpositions in Chinese. For this corpus we have adapted Schneider et al.’s (2018) Semantic Network of Ad- position and Case Supersenses annotation scheme (SNACS; see §2.2) to Chinese.1 Though other languages were taken into consideration in designing SNACS, no serious annota- tion effort has been undertaken to confirm empirically that it generalizes to other languages. After developing new guidelines for syntactic phenomena in Chinese (§3), we ap- ply the SNACS supersenses to a translation of The Little Prince2 (Xiˇao Wáng Zˇı), finding the supersenses to be robust and achieving high inter-annotator agreement …

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