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3. Effect of Chinese characters on machine learning for Chinese author name disambiguation: A counterfactual evaluation

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   Kim, Jinseok; Kim, Jenna; Kim, Jinmo (January 2021, Journal of Information Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Chinese author names are known to be more difficult to disambiguate than other ethnic names because they tend to share surnames and forenames, thus creating many homonyms. In this study, we demonstrate how using Chinese characters can affect machine learning for author name disambiguation. For analysis, 15K author names recorded in Chinese are transliterated into English and simplified by initialising their forenames to create counterfactual scenarios, reflecting real-world indexing practices in which Chinese characters are usually unavailable. The results show that Chinese author names that are highly ambiguous in English or with initialised forenames tend to become less confusing if their Chinese characters are included in the processing. Our findings indicate that recording Chinese author names in native script can help researchers and digital libraries enhance authority control of Chinese author names that continue to increase in size in bibliographic data. 

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4. A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese

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   Adpositions are frequent markers of semantic relations, but they are highly ambiguous and vary significantly from language to language. Moreover, there is a dearth of annotated corpora for investigating the cross-linguistic variation of adposition semantics, or for building multilingual disambiguation systems. This paper presents a corpus in which all adpositions have been semantically annotated in Mandarin Chinese; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first Chinese corpus to be broadly annotated with adposition semantics. Our approach adapts a framework that defined a general set of supersenses according to ostensibly language-independent semantic criteria, though its development focused primarily on English prepositions (Schneider et al., 2018). We find that the supersense categories are well-suited to Chinese adpositions despite syntactic differences from English. On a Mandarin translation of The Little Prince, we achieve high inter-annotator agreement and analyze semantic correspondences of adposition tokens in bitext. 

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5. Rational Sentence Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese

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   Zhan, Meilin; Chen, Sihan; Levy, Roger; Lu, Jiayi; Gibson, Edward (December 2023, Cognitive Science)

   Abstract Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy‐channel model: They integrate both the real‐world plausibility of the meaning—the prior—and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy‐channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different from English. We present native Mandarin speakers sentences in a written modality (Experiment 1) and an auditory modality (Experiment 2) in three pairs of syntactic alternations. The critical materials are literally implausible but require differing numbers and types of edits in order to form more plausible sentences. Each sentence is followed by a comprehension question that allows us to infer whether the speakers interpreted the item literally, or made an inference toward a more likely meaning. Similar to previous research on related English constructions, Mandarin participants made the most inferences for implausible materials that could be inferred as plausible by deleting a single morpheme or inserting a single morpheme. Participants were less likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a preposition. And participants were least likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a main verb. Moreover, we found more inferences in written materials than spoken materials, possibly a result of a lack of word boundaries in written Chinese. Overall, the fact that the results were so similar to those found in related constructions in English suggests that the noisy‐channel proposal is robust. 

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