On the Idiosyncrasies of the Mandarin Chinese Classifier System

Shijia Liu, Hongyuan Mei, Adina Williams, Ryan Cotterell

Abstract
While idiosyncrasies of the Chinese classifier system have been a richly studied topic among linguists (Adams and Conklin, 1973; Erbaugh, 1986; Lakoff, 1986), not much work has been done to quantify them with statistical methods. In this paper, we introduce an information-theoretic approach to measuring idiosyncrasy; we examine how much the uncertainty in Mandarin Chinese classifiers can be reduced by knowing semantic information about the nouns that the classifiers modify. Using the empirical distribution of classifiers from the parsed Chinese Gigaword corpus (Graff et al., 2005), we compute the mutual information (in bits) between the distribution over classifiers and distributions over other linguistic quantities. We investigate whether semantic classes of nouns and adjectives differ in how much they reduce uncertainty in classifier choice, and find that it is not fully idiosyncratic; while there are no obvious trends for the majority of semantic classes, shape nouns reduce uncertainty in classifier choice the most.
Anthology ID:
N19-1415
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4100–4106
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1415
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1415
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shijia Liu, Hongyuan Mei, Adina Williams, and Ryan Cotterell. 2019. On the Idiosyncrasies of the Mandarin Chinese Classifier System. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 4100–4106, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Idiosyncrasies of the Mandarin Chinese Classifier System (Liu et al., NAACL 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/N19-1415.pdf
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