Automatic Inference of the Tense of Chinese Events Using Implicit Linguistic Information
Yuchen Zhang, Nianwen Xue · 2014
We address the problem of automatically inferring the tense of events in Chinese text. We use a new corpus annotated with Chinese semantic tense information and other implicit Chinese linguistic informa-tion using a “distant annotation ” method. We propose three improvements over a rel-atively strong baseline method – a statisti-cal learning method with extensive feature engineering. First, we add two sources of implicit linguistic information as fea-tures – eventuality type and modality of an event, which are also inferred automat-ically. Second, we perform joint learning on semantic tense, eventuality type, and modality of an event. Third, we train arti-ficial neural network models for this prob-lem and compare its performance with feature-based approaches. Experimental results show considerable improvements on Chinese tense inference. Our best per-formance reaches 68.6 % in accuracy, out-performing a strong baseline method. 1