This paper discusses the challenges of annotating the predicate-argument structure of Chinese verb compounds in Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a recent meaning representation framework that extends Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to cross-linguistic settings. The key issue is to decide whether to annotate the argument structure of a verb compound as a whole, or to annotate the argument structure of their component verbs as well as the relations between them. We examine different types of Chinese verb compounds, and propose how to annotate them based on the principle of compositionality, level of grammaticalization, and productivity of component verbs. We propose a solution to the practical problem of having to define the semantic roles for Chinese verb compounds that are quite open-ended by separating compositional verb compounds from verb compounds that are non-compositional or have grammaticalized verb components. For compositional verb compounds, instead of annotating the argument structure of the verb compound as a whole, we annotate the argument structure of the component verbs as well as the semantic relations between them as creating an exhaustive list of such verb compounds is infeasible. Verb compounds with grammaticalized verb components also tend to be productive and we represent grammaticalized verb compounds as either attributes of the primary verb or as relations.

Rooted in AMR, Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a graph-based formalism with nodes as concepts and edges as relations between them. When used to represent natural language semantics, UMR maps words in a sentence to concepts in the UMR graph. Multiword expressions (MWEs) pose a particular challenge to UMR annotation because they deviate from the default one-to-one mapping between words and concepts. There are different types of MWEs which require different kinds of annotation that must be specified in guidelines. This paper discusses the specific treatment for each type of MWE in UMR.