A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first semantically annotated corpus of Mandarin Chinese adpositions, enabling cross-linguistic semantic analysis and disambiguation, and demonstrates its effectiveness through high inter-annotator agreement and translation analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel Mandarin adposition corpus annotated with supersenses, adapting an English-based semantic framework for Chinese, and analyzes cross-linguistic semantic correspondences.

Findings

High inter-annotator agreement achieved

Supersense categories are effective for Chinese adpositions

Semantic correspondences analyzed in Mandarin-English bitext

Abstract

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.