Toward a Pan-Chinese Thesaurus

In this paper, we propose a corpus-based approach to the construction of a Pan-Chinese lexical resource, starting out with the aim to enrich existing Chinese thesauri in the Pan-Chinese context. The resulting thesaurus is thus expected to contain not only the core senses and usages of Chinese lexical items but also usages specific to individual Chinese speech communities. We introduce the rationale underlying the construction of the resource, outline the steps to be taken, and discuss some preliminary analyses. The work is backed up by a unique and large Chinese synchronous corpus containing textual data from various Chinese speech communities including Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei and Singapore.