Predicting Semantics from Syntactic Cues -- An Evaluation of Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations

Abstract

In this report, we describe our results of carefully studying the first chapter of two published Chinese translations of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, as translated by Wang and Lu (1966) and Xing et al. (1979). Our first step was to create a word-by-word alignment, in as much as that was possible. We then examined ways we could use the alignment to generate other resources, such as a dictionary and a procedure for automating the translation process. We then retranslated the text, using the rules we developed. We will present this set of rules and the resulting translation in the body of this report. The appendix contains the published Chinese texts that we worked from, the alignments of these texts, and the small dictionary we produced. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-122)