A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese
This addresses a gap in resources for cross-linguistic semantic analysis and multilingual disambiguation systems, though it is incremental as it adapts an existing framework to a new language.
The paper tackles the lack of annotated corpora for adposition semantics in Mandarin Chinese by creating the first broadly annotated corpus for this purpose, achieving high inter-annotator agreement on a translation of The Little Prince and showing that supersense categories are well-suited to Chinese despite syntactic differences from English.
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.