Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A Chinese semantic lexicon of senses and roles

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Language Resources and Evaluation Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We describe a Chinese lexical semantic resource that consists of 11,765 predicates (mostly verbs and their nominalizations) analyzed with coarse-grained senses and semantic roles. We show that distinguishing senses at a coarse-grained level is a necessary part of specifying the semantic roles and describe our strategies for sense determination for purposes of predicate-argument structure specification. The semantic roles are postulated to account for syntactic variations, the different ways in which the semantic roles of a predicate are realized. The immediate purpose for this lexical semantic resource is to support the annotation of the Chinese PropBank, but we believe it can also serve as stepping stone for higher-level semantic generalizations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. We use the terms semantic role labels and argument labels exchangeably throughout the article, unless otherwise specified.

  2. Semantic roles or argument labels refer to both core arguments and semantic adjuncts unless noted otherwise.

References

  • Baker, C., Fillmore, C., & Lowe, J. (1998). The Berkeley FrameNet Project. In Proceedings of COLING-ACL. Singapore.

  • Burchardt, A., Erk, K., Frank, A., Kowalski, A., Pado, S., & Pinkal, M. (2006). The SALSA corpus: A german corpus resource for lexical semantics. In Proceedings of LREC 2006. Genoa, Italy.

  • Chen, K. -J., & Huang, C. -R. (1990). Information-based case grammar. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Helsinki, Finland.

  • Chen, K. -J., Huang, C. -R., Chen, F. -Y., Luo, C. -C., Chang, M. -C., & Chen, C. -J. (2004). Sinica Treebank: Design criteria, representational issues and implementation. In A. Abeillé (Ed.), Building and using parsed corpora. Kluwer.

  • Kipper, K., Dang, H. T., & Palmer, M. (2000). Class-based construction of a verb lexicon. In AAAI-2000 Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Texas, Austin.

  • Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Bryant, N., & Palmer, M. (2006). Extending VerbNet with novel verb classes. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Genoa, Italy.

  • Kipper, K., Snyder, B., & Palmer, M. (2004). Extending a verb lexicon using a semantically annotated corpus. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Lisbon, Portugal.

  • Levin, B. (1993). English verbs and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyers, A., Reeves, R., Macleod, C., Szekely, R., Zielinska, V., Young, B., & Grishman, R. (2004). The Nombank project: An interim report. In Proceedings of the NAACL/HLT Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation. Boston, Massachusetts.

  • Palmer, M., Gildea, D., & Kingsbury, P. (2005). The Proposition Bank: An annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics, 31(1), 71–106.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xue, N. (2006). Annotating the predicate-argument structure of Chinese nominalizations. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Genoa, Italy.

  • Xue, N., & Palmer, M. (2003). Annotating the propositions in The Penn Chinese Treebank. In The Proceedings of the 2nd SIGHAN Workshop on Chinese Language Processing. Sapporo, Japan.

  • Xue, N., Xia Chiou, F.-D., & Palmer, M. (2005). The Penn Chinese Treebank: Phrase structure annotation of a large corpus. Natural Language Engineering, 11(2), 207–238.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yu, S., Zhu, X., Wang, H., & Zhang, Y. (2003). The grammatical knowledge-base of contemporary Chinese—a complete specification (in Chinese). Tsinghua University Press.

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part DOD via Grant MDA904-02-C-0412 and in part by the NSF ITR via Grant 130-1303-4-541984-XXXX-2000-1070. I would like to thank Jiang Zixin for his substantial contribution to this semantic lexicon, Martha Palmer for her steadfast support and encouragement, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of this special issue for their cogent and constructive comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Center for Spoken Language Research, University of Colorado, 1777 Exposition Drive, Suite #171, Boulder, CO, 80301, USA

    Nianwen Xue

Authors
  1. Nianwen Xue
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nianwen Xue.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Xue, N. A Chinese semantic lexicon of senses and roles. Lang Resources & Evaluation 40, 395–403 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9025-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9025-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation