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<Paper uid="W04-2614">
  <Title>Fine-Grained Lexical Semantic Representations and Compositionally-Derived Events in Mandarin Chinese</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Lexical semantics is becoming increasingly important in a variety of natural language applications from machine translation to text summarization to question answering.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since it is generally agreed that the verb is the locus of &amp;quot;meaning&amp;quot; in a natural language sentence, theories of verbal argument structure are extremely important for our understanding of lexical semantics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> An appropriate lexical semantic representation can illuminate difficult problems in language processing, expose facets of meaning relevant to the surface realization of sentential elements, and reveal insights about the organization of the human language faculty. In machine translation, a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; representation of verbs can straight-forwardly capture cross-linguistic divergences in the expression of arguments. In question answering, lexical semantics can be leveraged to bridge the gap between the way a question is asked and the way an answer is stated.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This paper explores fine-grained lexical semantic representations--approaches that view a verb as more than a simple predicate of its arguments (e.g., Dang et al., 2000). This contrasts with recent semantic annotation projects such as PropBank (Kingsbury and Palmer, 2002) and FrameNet (Baker et al., 1998). For example, while it is undeniable that throw(John, the ball, Mary), is a valid representation for the sentence &amp;quot;John threw the ball to Mary&amp;quot;, it is widely believed (at least by theoretical linguists) that decomposing verbs in terms of more basic primitives can better capture generalizations about verb meaning and argument realization. I will argue that finer-grained semantics is not only theoretically motivated, but necessary for building applications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> I first provide a brief overview of theories of verbal argument structure, and then contrast the typology of Mandarin verbs with that of English verbs. I will present evidence from Chinese that verb meaning is compositionally &amp;quot;built up&amp;quot; from primitive notions of stativity and activity. The consequence, therefore, is that &amp;quot;flat&amp;quot; representations lacking internal structure are unable to capture the verbal semantics of a language like Mandarin. Productive phenomena such as verbal compounding render enumeration of all permissible verbs impossible. Verb meaning, therefore, must be represented decompositionally in terms of underlying primitives. This paper does not propose a concrete lexical semantic representation, but rather focuses on the requirements, for natural language applications, of such a representation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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