Knowledge representation of non-literal meanings of Chinese words and its applications

Abstract

As a parataxis language, Chinese is characterized by its word formation. The meanings of Chinese literal words can somehow be expressed by their word-formation patterns and morphemic concepts, but the meanings of non-literal words are quite deviant and retard a deeper understanding of the language. This paper discusses the knowledge representation of non-literal meanings of Chinese words from the perspective of language cognition. We explored the non-literal meanings of disyllabic words in the Modern Chinese Dictionary, labeled the meanings as specific metaphorical or metonymic types, and annotated their source and target domains in Tongyici Cilin and their synonyms with literal meanings. For the first time at the lexical level, our study systematically reveals the distribution of types and semantic domain mapping of Chinese metaphors and metonymy, as well as significantly improves the performance of word similarity calculations under the same algorithmic frame. These ideas, practices, and language resources construction are expected to promote the in-depth development of humanities and computing applications as well.