Defining a Methodology for Mapping Chinese & English Sense Inventories

Vicky Tzuyin Lai, Meiyu Chang, Cecily Jill Duffield, Jena D. Hwang, Nianwen Xue & Martha Palmer

Abstract for paper presented at
Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop
Hong Kong
May 21-23 2007

In this study, we explored methods for linking Chinese and English sense inventories using two opposing approaches: creating links (1) bottom-up: by starting at the finer-grained sense level then proceeding to the verb subcategorization frames and (2) top-down: by starting directly with the more coarse-grained frame levels. The sense inventories for linking include pre-existing corpora, such as English Propbank (Palmer, Gildea, and Kingsbury, 2005), Chinese Propbank (Xue and Palmer, 2004) and English WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) and newly created corpora, the English and Chinese Sense Inventories from DARPA-GALE OntoNotes. In the linking task, we selected a group of highly frequent and polysemous communication verbs, including say, ask, talk, and speak in English, and shuo, biao-shi, jiang, and wen in Chinese. We found that with the bottom-up method, although speakers of both languages agreed on the links between senses, the subcategorization frames of the corresponding senses did not match consistently. With the top-down method, if the verb frames match in both languages, their senses line up more quickly to each other. The results indicate that the top-down method is more promising in linking English and Chinese sense inventories.

Vicky Tzuyin Lai is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She can be reached at:Vicky.Lai@Colorado.edu.

Meiyu Chang is a research assistant in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado. Cecily Jill Duffield and Jena D. Hwang are graduate students in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Naiwen Xue is a senior research associate at the Center for Spoken Language Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Martha Palmer is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.