# A Corpus of Adpositional Supersenses for Mandarin Chinese

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08437 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08437/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [PASTRIE: A Corpus of Prepositions Annotated with Supersense Tags in Reddit International English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12243/) (2021)
- [Supersense and Sensibility: Proxy Tasks for Semantic Annotation of Prepositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14961/) (2021)
- [Reanalyzing L2 Preposition Learning with Bayesian Mixed Effects and a Pretrained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08150/) (2023)
- [MASALA: Modelling and Analysing the Semantics of Adpositions in Linguistic Annotation of Hindi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03955/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adpositions are frequent markers of semantic relations, but they are highly ambiguous and vary significantly from language to language. Moreover, there is a dearth of annotated corpora for investigating the cross-linguistic variation of adposition semantics, or for building multilingual disambiguation systems. This paper presents a corpus in which all adpositions have been semantically annotated in Mandarin Chinese; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first Chinese corpus to be broadly annotated with adposition semantics. Our approach adapts a framework that defined a general set of supersenses according to ostensibly language-independent semantic criteria, though its development focused primarily on English prepositions (Schneider et al., 2018). We find that the supersense categories are well-suited to Chinese adpositions despite syntactic differences from English. On a Mandarin translation of The Little Prince, we achieve high inter-annotator agreement and analyze semantic correspondences of adposition tokens in bitext.