Abstract
This paper introduces Cifu, a lexical database for Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) that offers phonological and orthographic information, frequency measures, and lexical neighborhood information for lexical items in HKC. Cifu is of use for NLP applications and the design and analysis of psycholinguistics experiments on HKC. We elaborate on the characteristics and challenges specific to HKC that were relevant in the design of Cifu. This includes lexical, orthographic and phonological aspects of HKC, word segmentation issues, the place of HKC in written media, and the availability of data. We discuss the measure of Neighborhood Density (ND), highlighting how the analytic nature of Cantonese and its writing system affect that measure. We justify using six different variations of ND, based on the possibility of inserting or deleting phonemes when searching for neighbors and on the choice of data for retrieving frequencies. Statistics about the four genres (written, adult spoken, children spoken and child-directed) within the dataset are discussed. We find that the lexical diversity of the child-directed speech genre is particularly low, compared to a size-matched written corpus. The correlations of word frequencies of different genres are all high, but in generally decrease as word length increases.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.lrec-1.375
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3069–3077
- Language:
- English
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.375
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Regine Lai and Grégoire Winterstein. 2020. Cifu: a Frequency Lexicon of Hong Kong Cantonese. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3069–3077, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- Cifu: a Frequency Lexicon of Hong Kong Cantonese (Lai & Winterstein, LREC 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2020.lrec-1.375.pdf