Chinese-DiMLex: a lexicon of Chinese discourse connectives

Abstract

Machine-readable inventories of connectives that provide information on multiple levels are a useful resource for automated discourse parsing, machine translation, text summarization and argumentation mining, etc. Despite Chinese being one of the world’s most widely spoken languages and having a wealth of annotated corpora, such a lexicon for Chinese still remains absent. In contrast, lexicons for many other languages have long been established. In this paper, we present 226 Chinese discourse connectives, augmented with morphological variations, syntactic (part-of-speech) and semantic (PDBT3.0 sense inventory) information, usage examples and English translations. The resulting lexicon, Chinese-DiMLex, is made publicly available in XML format, and is included in connective-lex.info, a platform specifically designed for human-friendly browsing of connective lexicons across languages. We describe the creation process of the lexicon, and discuss several Chinese-specific considerations and issues arising and discussed in the process. By demonstrating the process, we hope not only to contribute to research and educational purposes, but also to inspire researchers to use our method as a reference for building lexicons for their (native) language(s).