A Synchronous Corpus-Based Study of Verb-Noun Fluidity in Chinese

A Synchronous Corpus-Based Study of Verb-Noun Fluidity in Chinese Oi Yee Kwong and Benjamin K. Tsou Language Information Sciences Research Centre City University of Hong Kong Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong {rlolivia, rlbtsou}@cityu.edu.hk Abstract The problem of verb-noun categorial ambiguity is critical and relatively unique for non-inflectional languages, especially Chinese. We consider the verb-noun categorial fluidity a continuum and any categorial shift a transitional process. A synchronous corpus-based study was conducted to compare the phenomenon with respect to news texts collected from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taiwan. It was found that about 15% of the verbs in the Hong Kong and Taiwan texts were undergoing the verb-noun categorial shift; whereas Beijing texts had more than 18% of the verbs undergoing this shift. The results also have important implications on various natural language applications, including lexicography, part-of-speech tagging of Chinese, as well as other natural language processing tasks. 1� Introduction The problem of part-of-speech (POS) or categorial ambiguity, especially between nouns and verbs, as well as adjectives and verbs, has been widely discussed in the literature. Most contemporary Chinese grammarians would suggest that Chinese words have predefined lexical categories mainly based on their syntactic properties, which should not be contingent upon the grammatical function the words take in particular sentences (e.g. Zhu, 2001). For example, the word' MI huai2yi2, with a verb sense ("to suspect") to start with, should only appear as a verb in a dictionary, despite its variable usages found in real contexts, as in (1)1. (1) a. RigititAv (I suspect he is a thief) -- verbal, predicate wo3 huai2yi2 tal shi4 zei2 b. ft 1 74. ,;.-t Piri (He wears a suspicious look) -- adjectival, modifier tal man3lian3 huai2yi2 biao3qing2 c. aRAftni� (This is only my suspicion) -- nominal, head of object noun phrase zhe4 zhi3shi4 wo3 des huai2yi2 We call this relative flexibility of a word being used for different grammatical functions and possibly different POSs "categorial fluidity". This phenomenon thus poses a dilemma on tagging Chinese corpora. On the one hand, the theoretical and lexicographic concern is to keep the whole classification of Chinese syntactic categories straightforward, so that all words can be prescribed a category and all categories can be adequately described. On the other hand, the practical concern is to obtain authentic data on the distribution of word uses as this is the ultimate purpose of corpus tagging. Chinese POS tagging in the past had handled this problem in different ways (e.g. CKIP, 1993; Yu et al., 1998; Xia, 2000). For instance, regarding the fluidity between verbs and nouns, Xia (2000) assigned a verb tag if the word is used as a verb and a noun tag if it is used as a noun; whereas CKIP (1993) assigned the same 1 The digits following the Hanyu pinyin indicate the tone. 194 tag to the same word, but used features to encode specific grammatical functions, such as using [+nomj to indicate a nominalised usage of a verb. We suggest that the two concerns could …

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