Chinese-English Semantic Resource Construction

Abstract

We describe an approach to large-scale construction of a semantic lexicon for Chinese verbs. We leverage off of three existing resources--a classification of English verbs called EVCA (English Verbs Classes and Alterations) [Levin, 1993], a Chinese conceptual database called HowNet [Zhendong, 1988c, Zhendong, 1988b] (http://www.how-net.com), and a large machine-readable dictionary called Optilex. The resulting lexicon is used for determining appropriate word senses in applications such as machine translation and cross-language information retrieval. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2000-27) (Also cross-referenced as LAMP-TR-044)