Solving and Generating Chinese Character Riddles

Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 846–855, Austin, Texas, November 1-5, 2016. c⃝2016 Association for Computational Linguistics Solving and Generating Chinese Character Riddles Chuanqi Tan† ∗ Furu Wei‡ Li Dong+ Weifeng Lv† Ming Zhou‡ †State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, China ‡Microsoft Research Asia †tanchuanqi@nlsde.buaa.edu.cn+University of Edinburgh ‡{fuwei, mingzhou}@microsoft.com+li.dong@ed.ac.uk †lwf@buaa.edu.cn Abstract Chinese character riddle is a riddle game in which the riddle solution is a single Chi- nese character. It is closely connected with the shape, pronunciation or meaning of Chi- nese characters. The riddle description (sen- tence) is usually composed of phrases with rich linguistic phenomena (such as pun, sim- ile, and metaphor), which are associated to different parts (namely radicals) of the so- lution character. In this paper, we propose a statistical framework to solve and generate Chinese character riddles. Specifically, we learn the alignments and rules to identify the metaphors between phrases in riddles and rad- icals in characters. Then, in the solving phase, we utilize a dynamic programming method to combine the identified metaphors to obtain candidate solutions. In the riddle generation phase, we use a template-based method and a replacement-based method to obtain candi- date riddle descriptions. We then use Rank- ing SVM to rerank the candidates both in the solving and generation process. Experimental results in the solving task show that the pro- posed method outperforms baseline methods. We also get very promising results in the gen- eration task according to human judges. 1 Introduction The riddle is regarded as one of the most unique and vital elements in traditional Chinese culture, which is usually composed of a riddle description ∗The work was done when the first author and the third author were interns at Microsoft Research Asia. and a corresponding solution. The character rid- dle is one of the most popular forms of various rid- dles in which the riddle solution is a single Chinese character. While English words are strings of let- ters together, Chinese characters are composed of radicals that associate with meaning or metaphor. In other words, Chinese characters are usually posi- tioned into some common structures, such as upper- lower structure, left-right structure, inside-outside structure, which means they can be decomposed into other characters or radicals. For example, “好” (good), a character with left-right structure, can be decomposed into “女” (daughter) and “子” (son). As illustrated in Figure 1(a), the left part of “好” is “女” and the right part is “子”. “女” and “子” are called the “radical” of “好”. Figure 1(b) is another exam- ple of the character “思” (miss) with an upper-lower structure. 好 女 子 good daughter son (a) Left-Right Structure 思 田 心 field miss heart (b) Upper-Lower Structure Figure 1: Examples of the structure of Chinese characters One of the most important characteristics of char- acter riddle lies in the structure of Chinese charac- ters. Unlike the common riddles which imply the object in the riddle descriptions, character riddles pay more attention to …

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