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)
- Editors:
- Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
- 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
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.258.pdf