Negation Scope Resolution for Chinese as a Second Language

Mengyu Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Shuqiao Sun, Weiwei Sun


Abstract
This paper studies Negation Scope Resolution (NSR) for Chinese as a Second Language (CSL), which shows many unique characteristics that distinguish itself from “standard” Chinese. We annotate a new moderate-sized corpus that covers two background L1 languages, viz. English and Japanese. We build a neural NSR system, which achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy on English benchmark data. We leverage this system to gauge how successful NSR for CSL can be. Different native language backgrounds of language learners result in unequal cross-lingual transfer, which has a significant impact on processing second language data. In particular, manual annotation, empirical evaluation and error analysis indicate two non-obvious facts: 1) L2-Chinese, L1-Japanese data are more difficult to analyze and thus annotate than L2-Chinese, L1-English data; 2) computational models trained on L2-Chinese, L1-Japanese data perform better than models trained on L2-Chinese, L1-English data.
Anthology ID:
2021.bea-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ekaterina Kochmar, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildikó Pilán, Helen Yannakoudakis, Torsten Zesch
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–10
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.bea-1.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mengyu Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Shuqiao Sun, and Weiwei Sun. 2021. Negation Scope Resolution for Chinese as a Second Language. In Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 1–10, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Negation Scope Resolution for Chinese as a Second Language (Zhang et al., BEA 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.bea-1.1.pdf