Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese
Yilun Zhu, Yang Liu, Siyao Peng, Austin Blodgett, Yushi Zhao, Nathan Schneider · ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2019
This study adapts Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) annotation to Mandarin Chinese and demonstrates that the same supersense categories are appropriate for Chinese adposition semantics. We annotated 20 chapters of The Little Prince, with high interannotator agreement. The parallel corpus substantiates the applicability of construal analysis in Chinese and gives insight into the differences in construals between adpositions in two languages. The corpus can further support automatic disambiguation of adpositions in Chinese, and the common inventory of supersenses between the two languages can potentially serve cross-linguistic tasks such as machine translation.