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Sememe Tree Prediction for English-Chinese Word Pairs

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Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing: Knowledge Graph and Cognitive Intelligence (CCKS 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1356))

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Abstract

Sememe is the minimum unambiguous semantic unit in human language. The semantics of word senses are encoded and expressed by sememe trees in sememe knowledge base. Sememe knowledge benefits many NLP tasks. But it is time-consuming to construct the sememe knowledge base manually. There is one existing work that slightly involves sememe tree prediction, but there are two limitations. The first is they use the word as the unit instead of the word sense. The second is that their method only deals with words with dictionary definitions, not all words. In this article, we use English and Chinese bilingual information to help disambiguate word sense. We propose the Chinese and English bilingual sememe tree prediction task which can automatically extend the famous knowledge base HowNet. And we propose two methods. For a given word pair with categorial sememe, starting from the root node, the first method uses neural networks to gradually generate edges and nodes in a depth-first order. The second is a recommended method. For a given word pair with categorial sememe, we find some word pairs with the same categorial sememe and semantically similar to it, and construct a propagation function to transfer sememe tree information of these word pairs to the word pair to be predicted. Experiments show that our method has a significant effect of F1 84.0%. Further, we use the Oxford English-Chinese Bilingual Dictionary as data and add about 90,000 word pairs to HowNet, nearly expanding HowNet by half.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    \(P_{s_i}+r_i=[s_1, r_1, \ldots , s_{i-1}, r_{i-1}, s_i, r_i]\).

  2. 2.

    \(P_{s_i}+r_i+s_{i+1}=[s_1, r_1, \ldots , s_{i-1}, r_{i-1}, s_i, r_i, s_{i+1}]\).

  3. 3.

    https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/.

  4. 4.

    https://ai.tencent.com/ailab/nlp/embedding.html.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Key Technology Develop and Research Project (SGTJDK00DWJS1900242) in STATE GRID Corporation of China.

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Correspondence to Lei Hou .

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Liu, B., Shang, X., Liu, L., Tan, Y., Hou, L., Li, J. (2021). Sememe Tree Prediction for English-Chinese Word Pairs. In: Chen, H., Liu, K., Sun, Y., Wang, S., Hou, L. (eds) Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing: Knowledge Graph and Cognitive Intelligence. CCKS 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1356. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1964-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1964-9_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-16-1963-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-16-1964-9

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