Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese
This work provides an annotated corpus for Chinese adposition disambiguation, potentially aiding cross-linguistic tasks like machine translation, but it is incremental as it extends an existing framework to a new language.
The study adapted SNACS annotation to Mandarin Chinese, showing that the same supersense categories apply to Chinese adpositions, with high interannotator agreement on 15 chapters of The Little Prince.
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.