Yushi Zhao

Siyao Peng, Yang Liu, Yilun Zhu et al.

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.

Yilun Zhu, Yang Liu, Siyao Peng et al.

This study adapts Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) annotation to Mandarin Chinese and demonstrates that the same supersense categories are appropriate for Chinese adposition semantics. We annotated 15 chapters of The Little Prince, with high interannotator agreement. The parallel corpus gives insight into differences in construal between the two languages' adpositions, namely a number of construals that are frequent in Chinese but rare or unattested in the English corpus. The annotated corpus can further support automatic disambiguation of adpositions in Chinese, and the common inventory of supersenses between the two languages can potentially serve cross-linguistic tasks such as machine translation.