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<Paper uid="W03-1706">
  <Title>The Effect of Rhythm on Structural Disambiguation in Chinese</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The length of a constituent (number of syllables in a word or number of words in a phrase), or rhythm, plays an important role in Chinese syntax. This paper systematically surveys the distribution of rhythm in constructions in Chinese from the statistical data acquired from a shallow tree bank.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Based on our survey, we then used the rhythm feature in a practical shallow parsing task by using rhythm as a statistical feature to augment a PCFG model. Our results show that using the probabilistic rhythm feature significantly improves the performance of our shallow parser.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>