Buy one get one free: Distant annotation of Chinese tense, event type and modality

Nianwen Xue, Yuchen Zhang


Abstract
We describe a “distant annotation” method where we mark up the semantic tense, event type, and modality of Chinese events via a word-aligned parallel corpus. We first map Chinese verbs to their English counterparts via word alignment, and then annotate the resulting English text spans with coarse-grained categories for semantic tense, event type, and modality that we believe apply to both English and Chinese. Because English has richer morpho-syntactic indicators for semantic tense, event type and modality than Chinese, our intuition is that this distant annotation approach will yield more consistent annotation than if we annotate the Chinese side directly. We report experimental results that show stable annotation agreement statistics and that event type and modality have significant influence on tense prediction. We also report the size of the annotated corpus that we have obtained, and how different domains impact annotation consistency.
Anthology ID:
L14-1307
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1412–1416
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/353_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nianwen Xue and Yuchen Zhang. 2014. Buy one get one free: Distant annotation of Chinese tense, event type and modality. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 1412–1416, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Buy one get one free: Distant annotation of Chinese tense, event type and modality (Xue & Zhang, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/353_Paper.pdf