Semantic Typology and Parallel Corpora: Something about Indefinite Pronouns.
Barend Beekhuizen, Julia Watson, Suzanne Stevenson · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2017
Patterns of crosslinguistic variation in the expression of wordmeaning are informative about semantic organization, but mostmethods to study this are labor intensive and obscure the gra-dient nature of concepts. We propose an automatic method forextracting crosslinguistic co-categorization patterns from par-allel texts, and explore the properties of the data as a potentialsource for automatically creating semantic representations forcognitive modeling. We focus on indefinite pronouns, com-paring our findings against a study based on secondary sources(Haspelmath 1997). We show that using automatic methods onparallel texts contributes to more cognitively-plausible seman-tic representations for a domain.