Analysis of Chinese Morphemes and Its Application to Sense and Part-Of-Speech Prediction for Chinese Compounds

Since new compounds are generated very productively in Chinese, an automatic scheme is required to predict their part-of-speeches and senses in order to automate computer language processing. To this end, we analyzed the morphosyntactic behaviors of about 4,025 morphemes (characters) in our Affix database. We found that semantic and logical compatibility are more important than syntactic constraints in compounding. Hence, we classified morphemes into four major semantic types: object, act, attribute and value, and use semantic composition rules to predict the meaning and part-of-speech of compounds. Some morpheme types and composition rules are ambiguous. We propose constraint-based resolutions to deal with them. KeywordsChinese compounds, semantic type, affix, part-ofspeech prediction, sense disambiguation