Shallow semantic parsing of Chinese

In this paper we address the question of assigning semantic roles to sentences in Chinese. We show that good semantic parsing results for Chinese can be achieved with a small 1100-sentence training set. In order to extract features from Chinese, we describe porting the Collins parser to Chinese, resulting in the best performance currently reported on Chinese syntactic parsing; we include our head-rules in the appendix. Finally, we compare English and Chinese semantic-parsing performance. While slight differences in argument labeling make a perfect comparison impossible, our results nonetheless suggest significantly better performance for Chinese. We show that much of this difference is due to grammatical differences between English and Chinese, such as the prevalence of passive in English, and the strict word order constraints on adjuncts in Chinese.