Computational Modeling of Affixoid Behavior in Chinese Morphology

Yu-Hsiang Tseng, Shu-Kai Hsieh, Pei-Yi Chen, Sara Court


Abstract
The morphological status of affixes in Chinese has long been a matter of debate. How one might apply the conventional criteria of free/bound and content/function features to distinguish word-forming affixes from bound roots in Chinese is still far from clear. Issues involving polysemy and diachronic dynamics further blur the boundaries. In this paper, we propose three quantitative features in a computational model of affixoid behavior in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that, except for in a very few cases, there are no clear criteria that can be used to identify an affix’s status in an isolating language like Chinese. A diachronic check using contextualized embeddings with the WordNet Sense Inventory also demonstrates the possible role of the polysemy of lexical roots across diachronic settings.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.258
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2879–2888
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.258
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.258
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu-Hsiang Tseng, Shu-Kai Hsieh, Pei-Yi Chen, and Sara Court. 2020. Computational Modeling of Affixoid Behavior in Chinese Morphology. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2879–2888, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Computational Modeling of Affixoid Behavior in Chinese Morphology (Tseng et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.coling-main.258.pdf