UMR annotation of C hinese Verb compounds and related constructions (2023)

Abstract: This paper discusses the challenges of annotating the predicate-argument structure of Chinese verb compounds in Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a recent meaning representation framework that extends Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to cross-linguistic settings. The key issue is to decide whether to annotate the argument structure of a verb compound as a whole, or to annotate the argument structure of their component verbs as well as the relations between them. We examine different types of Chinese verb compounds, and propose how to annotate them based on the principle of compositionality, level of grammaticalization, and productivity of component verbs. We propose a solution to the practical problem of having to define the semantic roles for Chinese verb compounds that are quite open-ended by separating compositional verb compounds from verb compounds that are non-compositional or have grammaticalized verb components. For compositional verb compounds, instead of annotating the argument structure of the verb compound as a whole, we annotate the argument structure of the component verbs as well as the semantic relations between them as creating an exhaustive list of such verb compounds is infeasible. Verb compounds with grammaticalized verb components also tend to be productive and we represent grammaticalized verb compounds as either attributes of the primary verb or as relations.

## introduction uniform meaning representation (umr) @xcite is a meaning representation designed to annotate the semantic content of a text and it pairs a sentence-level representation with a document-level representation. its sentencelevel representation adopts the predicate-argument structure backbone of abstract meaning representation (amr) @xcite but extends it to cross-linguistic settings by providing shared concepts and relations that can be applied cross-linguistically, particularly to morphologically complex low-resource languages. umr also adds a document-level representation that captures linguistic phenomena such as coreference as well as temporal @xcite and modal dependencies @xcite that potentially go beyond sentence boundaries . for the predicate-argument structure annotation, umr is flexible in allowing the use of both generic semantic roles such as agent, theme, patient and predicate-specific roles, a practice popularized by the proposition bank approach to semantic role labeling @xcite . the predicate-specific roles in the propbanks are defined in frame files that have entries for each predicate in a language. for each sense of a predicate, a set of core roles are assigned unique numerical ids that are prefixed by arg. for instance, the non-polysemous english verb "sink" has the following roles: arg0: causer of sinking arg1: thing sinking arg2: extent arg3: start point arg4: end point, destination arg5: instrument these roles can then be used to annotate instances of "sink", where not all arguments of sink may be realized: the challenge, however, is that chinese verb compounds involve various degrees of grammaticalization and idiomaticity, and it is not always appropriate to treat component verbs in a compound as separate predicates that each have their argument structures. in order for there to be consistent annotation, there needs to be a set of criteria that the annotator follows when determining which verb compounds should be treated holistically as having a single argument structure and which should have separate predicate-argument structures for their component verbs. in this paper, we will examine different types of verb compounds and propose how we will annotate them in umr. when deciding if a verb compound needs to have the argument structure of their component verbs annotated, we consider idiomaticity (or non-compositionality), levels of grammaticalization, and productivity. for instance, when a verb compound becomes highly id-iomatic and its meaning as a whole cannot be predicted from their component verbs, it no longer makes sense to annotate the predicate-argument structure of the component verbs. similarly, when a component verb in a verb compound is highly grammaticalized and its lexical content is semantically "bleached", there is less value in annotating the predicate-argument structure of this component verb, and it is more appropriate to treat them as attributes for the primary predicates or as relations between the primary predicates and one of its arguments. when examining these verb compounds, we will classify them into broad categories based on syntactic and semantic relations between their component verbs, as they have been standardly done in linguistic annotation work @xcite . here we focus on verb compounds that consist of two verbs, in the form of v 1 and v 2 . they include resultative (vr) and directional verb (vd) compounds, subordinating compounds (vsb) in which the first verb modifies the second verb, coordinating compounds (vcd) in which the verbs either happen sequentially or have an equal status, and verb compounds that have the second verb as a copula verb (vcp). we will also examine the umr annotation of light verb constructions that are similar in form but not content to verb compounds. the rest of the paper is organized as follows. in section 2, we examine different types of verb compounds and show how they are treated in umr. in section 3, we discuss how to annotate related verb constructions in umr. we discuss related work in section 4, and conclude in section 5. ## types of verb compounds in this section we examine different types of verb compounds, and show how we plan to annotate them in umr. ## related verb constructions light verb constructions are also worth discussion here. when determining the type of semantic relations that hold between v 1 and v 2 in a verb compound in umr annotation, it is important to first determine whether it is a verb compound in the first place. one construction that is similar to verb compounds in appearance is the light verb construction, which also has a verb followed by a deverbal noun that is identical in form to verbs as chinese verbs can function as a noun without having to have a derivational suffix. this is illustrated in ( 23 ), where 进行 [jinxing "hold"] 讨论 [taolun, "discussion"] is a light verb construction in which (23) 小王 xiaowang 用 use 图表 graph 进行-讨论 operate-discuss "xiaowang use graph to discuss. " (x4a / 讨论-01[taolun, "discuss"] :instrument (x2 / 图表[tubiao, "graph"]) :arg0 ( i / individual-person :name (n / name :op ''小王" [xiaowang])) :aspect performance :modstr fullaff) 进行 [jinxing, "process"] is a light verb in this sentence, thus it is not annotated in the graph. 讨 论 [taolun, "discuss"] is treated as the predicate. ## related work theoretical discussion on v-v compounds . chinese v-v compounds, particularly resultative verb compounds have received a lot of discussion in theoretical linguistics literature. most of the discussion centers on the issue of whether such compounds are formed in lexicon or in syntax. @xcite @xcite generally hold that v-v compounds are produced in lexicon and it is theta identification that restricts the possible v-v constructions. however, @xcite hold the view that v-v compounds are generated via syntactic operations. some other works @xcite charted a course in the middle, arguing that verb compounds are generated in both lexicon and syntax. there are also discussions @xcite specifically on directional verb compounds. most of the discussions have implicitly assumed these compounds are compositional without providing a set of criteria for how to distinguish compositional from non-compositional verb compounds. for umr annotation, however, out of necessity we first to determine whether they are compositional or not as we have to decide what concepts to propose. the question of whether they are generated in syntax or the lexicon is of secondary importance. here we provide a classification of different types of verb compounds in chinese and show how compositional verb compounds can be distinguished from non-compositional verb compounds and how each type of verb compounds can be annotated in umr. ## conclusion in this paper we describe the challenge to annotate chinese verb compounds in the uniform meaning representation framework as compounding is a productive process in chinese. we propose a solution that is based on treating different types of verb compounds differently based on compositionality, levels of grammaticalization, and productivity of these verb compounds. for compounds that are non-compositional, we annotate the argument structure of the verb compound as a whole, but for compositional verb compounds, we annotate the argument structure of their component verbs, obviating the need to create an additional frame file entry for the compound verb as a whole. for verb compounds that have highly grammaticalized verb components, we also annotate the argument structure of the verb compound as a whole, but link its argument structure to that of the primary verb in the verb compound so that there is no need to create a completely new frame file.