A Chinese semantic lexicon of senses and roles

We describe a Chinese lexical semantic resource that consists of 11,765 predicates (mostly verbs and their nominalizations) analyzed with coarse-grained senses and semantic roles. We show that distinguishing senses at a coarse-grained level is a necessary part of specifying the semantic roles and describe our strategies for sense determination for purposes of predicate-argument structure specification. The semantic roles are postulated to account for syntactic variations, the different ways in which the semantic roles of a predicate are realized. The immediate purpose for this lexical semantic resource is to support the annotation of the Chinese PropBank, but we believe it can also serve as stepping stone for higher-level semantic generalizations.