Parsing Chinese with Combinatory Categorial Grammar: A Linguistic and Computational Study

Abstract

Parsing Chinese language with CCG is very difficult because the architecture and assumptions of CCG do not fit well with facts from Chinese. Based on the concept of “realization” proposed by Zhu Dexi (1920–1992), this study sheds light on the discrepancy between CCG and Chinese syntax and puts forward a refined schema for Chinese compositionality. The discussion is supported by the data of Chinese CCGbank (CASS). Furthermore, by activating a function-based category setting and a noun/verb disambiguating tagging mechanism, we develop a rule-based mini-Chinese CCG parser without deep learning. The new NVN parser surpasses existing Chinese CCG parser C&C in parsing effect (LF 85.9 vs. LF 74.6) on a partial PCTB 6.0 test set of 500 sentences.