Automatic Mapping Between Large-Scale Heterogeneous Language Resources for NLP Applications: A Case of Sejong Semantic Classes and KorLexNoun for Korean

Park, Heum,Yoon, Ae-Sun Korean Society for Language and Information 2011 언어와 정보 Vol.15 No.2

This paper proposes a statistical-based linguistic methodology for automatic mapping between large-scale heterogeneous languages resources for NLP applications in general. As a particular case, it treats automatic mapping between two large-scale heterogeneous Korean language resources: Sejong Semantic Classes (SJSC) in the Sejong Electronic Dictionary (SJD) and nouns in KorLex. KorLex is a large-scale Korean WordNet, but it lacks syntactic information. SJD contains refined semantic-syntactic information, with semantic labels depending on SJSC, but the list of its entry words is much smaller than that of KorLex. The goal of our study is to build a rich language resource by integrating useful information within SJD into KorLex. In this paper, we use both linguistic and statistical methods for constructing an automatic mapping methodology. The linguistic aspect of the methodology focuses on the following three linguistic clues: monosemy/polysemy of word forms, instances (example words), and semantically related words. The statistical aspect of the methodology uses the three statistical formulae ${\chi}^2$, Mutual Information and Information Gain to obtain candidate synsets. Compared with the performance of manual mapping, the automatic mapping based on our proposed statistical linguistic methods shows good performance rates in terms of correctness, specifically giving recall 0.838, precision 0.718, and F1 0.774.

Processing Nominal Suffixes in Korean: Evidence from Priming Experiments

Ahn, Hee-Don,An, Duk-Ho,Choi, Jung-Yun,Hwang, Jong-Bai,Jeon, Moon-Gee,Kim, Ji-Hyon Korean Society for Language and Information 2011 언어와 정보 Vol.15 No.1

This study investigates morphologically complex nouns in Korean through a series of priming studies. Two experiments examined whether morphological affixes on Korean nouns were decomposed or processed as a whole. Two types of morphological affixes were examined: morpho-syntactic case markers and the plural marker '-tul'. Results showed that priming occurred for the plural marker with SOAs of 80 ms and 160 ms, but no priming occurred for the morpho-syntactic case markers. These results suggest that the morphological processing for these two types of affixes differ. We argue that Korean nouns with the plural suffix are decomposed into the stem and affix, supporting the Decomposition Model (Pinker & Ullman, 2002). We suggest that while plural markers are truly morphological affixes, case markers in Korean are morpho-syntactic, and thus presuppose the existence of other syntactic elements, such as the matrix verb, hence the lack of priming effects.

On Subjunctives in Korean: Exploiting a Bilingual Corpus

Song, Sanghoun Korean Society for Language and Information 2014 언어와 정보 Vol.18 No.1

This paper provides a corpus study on subjunctives in Korean in a way of comparative semantics. The whole arguments of this paper are bolstered by distributional evidence taken from naturally occurring bitexts (i.e. a bilingual corpus), in which one sentence in a language is aligned with one translation in the other language. Since previous studies regard past tense morphology as the main component to express irrealis and uncertainty, this paper accordingly checks out whether the past tense morpheme (e/a)ss in Korean is also responsible for conveying the meaning of subjunctives. My finding is that the past tense morpheme (e/a)ss is a sufficient condition for forming subjunctives in Korean. The current corpus study verifies that the past tense morpheme is not obligatorily used in present conditional counterfactuals in Korean, unlike English. Yet, if (e/a)ss is used and the antecedent denotes a present situation, the conditional sentence can only be interpreted as conveying counterfactuality. On the other hand, wish constructions in Korean, irrespective of the semantic tense, often contain the past tense morpheme. Hence, this work substantiates Iatridou (2000)'s theory of 'fake past tense' is applicable to Korean subjunctives. The present corpus study, additionally, reveals that a conditional marker telamyen is a component of expressing past counterfactuals in Korean.

Obligatory Control and Coordinated Deletion as Korean Subject Diagnostics: An Experimental Approach

Kim, Ji-Hye,Lee, Yong-hun,Kim, Eunah Korean Society for Language and Information 2015 언어와 정보 Vol.19 No.1

This study investigated the distribution of subject properties in Korean. Based on the previous studies on so-called 'subjecthood diagnostics' in Korean Multiple Subject Constructions (MSCs), the current study investigates how different subject properties are distributed in single subject constructions (Non-MSCs) and MSCs. Focusing on two distinct subject properties - obligatory control (OC) of PRO and coordinated deletion (CD) - an empirical syntactic experiment was designed to test how these two subjecthood diagnostics behave in the Non-MSC and MSC environments. Seventy Korean native speakers were tested over magnitude estimation task, composed of 80 Korean sentences representing different subject properties in single or multiple subject constructions. Overall results showed (i) both OC and CD can be used as subjecthood diagnostic tests in the Non-MSC environments, but (ii) that only OC can be used as a subjecthood diagnostic test in the MSC environments.

Parsing Korean Comparative Constructions in a Typed-Feature Structure Grammar

Kim, Jong-Bok,Yang, Jae-Hyung,Song, Sang-Houn Korean Society for Language and Information 2010 언어와 정보 Vol.14 No.1

The complexity of comparative constructions in each language has given challenges to both theoretical and computational analyses. This paper first identifies types of comparative constructions in Korean and discusses their main grammatical properties. It then builds a syntactic parser couched upon the typed feature structure grammar, HPSG and proposes a context-dependent interpretation for the comparison. To check the feasibility of the proposed analysis, we have implemented the grammar into the existing Korean Resource Grammar. The results show us that the grammar we have developed here is feasible enough to parse Korean comparative sentences and yield proper semantic representations though further development is needed for a finer model for contextual information.

Nominative/Accusative Adpositions in Negative Auxiliary Constructions

No, Yong-Kyoon Korean Society for Language and Information 2004 언어와 정보 Vol.8 No.2

The nominative and accusative postpositions in Korean may intervene between the negative auxiliary verb ANH and its complement verb phrase. As Korean is an OV language, this means that 'verb + {nom, acc} + ANH' as well as the simpler concatenation 'verb + ANH' is possible. This fact, together with an overwhelming regularity of these postpositions' optionality in virtually all constructions, poses a problem for formal approaches to the syntax of the language. Working in a constraint-based grammatical framework shaped by such works as Sag and Wasow (1999) and Copestake (2002), we put forth type hierarchies for major_class, which represents verb inflection, and for pos, which has two immediate subtypes, i.e., htrp_pos and ord_pos. What we call the 'half transparency' of the case postpositions separates them from all the other lexical items in the language. The type htrp_pos is used to constrain one of the two newly proposed head_comp_rules, where a newly proposed feature HEAD2 of a phrase inherits its value from the HEAD feature of the head word. The COMPS list of the negative auxiliary ANH is seen as containing a single phrase whose HEAD is a kind of nominal clause and whose HEAD2 is something that is one of the three maximal types: acc, nom, and null.

Parsing the Wh-Interrogative Construction in Korean

Yang, Jaehyung,Kim, Jong-Bok Korean Society for Language and Information 2013 언어와 정보 Vol.17 No.2

Korean is a wh-in-situ language where the wh-expression stays in situ with an obligatory Q-particle marking its interrogative scope. This paper briefly reviews some basic properties of the wh-question construction in Korean and shows how a typed feature structure grammar, HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994, Sag et al. 2003), together with the notions of 'type hierarchy' and 'constructions', can provide a robust basis for parsing the wh-construction in the language. We show that this system induces robust syntactic structures as well as enriched semantic representations for real-time applications such as machine translation, which require deep processing of the phenomena concerned.

From Montague Grammar to Database Semantics

Hausser, Roland Korean Society for Language and Information 2015 언어와 정보 Vol.19 No.2

This paper retraces the development of Database Semantics (DBS) from its beginnings in Montague grammar. It describes the changes over the course of four decades and explains why they were seen to be necessary. DBS was designed to answer the central theoretical question for building a talking robot: How does the mechanism of natural language communication work? For doing what is requested and reporting what is going on, a talking robot requires not only language but also non-language cognition. The contents of non-language cognition are re-used as the meanings of the language surfaces. Robot-externally, DBS handles the language-based transfer of content by using nothing but modality-dependent unanalyzed external surfaces such as sound shapes or dots on paper, produced in the speak mode and recognized n the hear mode. Robot-internally, DBS reconstructs cognition by integrating linguistic notions like functor-argument and coordination, philosophical notions like concept-, pointer-, and baptism-based reference, and notions of computer science like input-output, interface, data structure, algorithm, database schema, and functional flow.

Semantic Features of Countability in Korean

Kwak, Eun-Joo Korean Society for Language and Information 2009 언어와 정보 Vol.13 No.1

Since countability is a grammatical notion, the distinction between count and mass nouns may not reflect countability in the real world. Based on this, Chierchia (1998a; 1998b) provides a typological study of plurality and genericity, which does not account for countability in Korean. Nemoto (2005) revises Chierchia's analysis to deal with count and mass nouns in Korean and Japanese. This study discusses problems with the previous analyses and proposes that the semantic feature of humanness is the main criterion for countability in Korean.

Ordering a Left-branching Language: Heaviness vs. Givenness

Choi, Hye-Won Korean Society for Language and Information 2009 언어와 정보 Vol.13 No.1

This paper investigates ordering alternation phenomena in Korean using the dative construction data from Sejong Corpus of Modern Korean (Kim, 2000). The paper first shows that syntactic weight and information structure are distinct and independent factors that influence word order in Korean. Moreover, it reveals that heaviness and givenness compete each other and exert diverging effects on word order, which contrasts the converging effects of these factors shown in word orders of right-branching languages like English. The typological variation of syntactic weight effect poses interesting theoretical and empirical questions, which are discussed in relation to processing efficiency in ordering.