Constructing Taxonomy of Numerative Classifiers for Asian Languages
Kiyoaki Shirai, Takenobu Tokunaga, Chu‐Ren Huang, Shu‐Kai Hsieh, Tzu-Yi Kuo, Virach Sornlertlamvanich, Thatsanee Charoenporn · 2008
Numerative classifiers are ubiquitous in many Asian languages. This paper pro-poses a method to construct a taxonomy of numerative classifiers based on a noun-classifier agreement database. The taxon-omy defines superordinate-subordinate rela-tion among numerative classifiers and rep-resents the relations in tree structures. The experiments to construct taxonomies were conducted for evaluation by using data from three different languages: Chinese, Japanese and Thai. We found that our method was promising for Chinese and Japanese, but in-appropriate for Thai. It confirms that there really is no hierarchy among Thai classifiers. 1