Keynote Speech: Lexical Semantics of Chinese Language

In this talk, we are going to give a systematic view of lexical semantics of Chinese language. From macro perspective point of view, lexical conceptual meanings are classified into hierarchical semantic types and each type plays some particular semantic functions of Host, Attribute, and Value to form a semantic compositional system. Lexical senses and their compositional functions will be exemplified by the semantic expressions of E-HowNet. Entities and relations are two major semantic types of the compositional system. Lexical senses and phrasal senses are compositions of these two types. From micro perspective point of view, each lexical word has individual idiosyncratic semantic contents, focuses and features. Hence words of same semantic type may have various different syntactic properties which make automatic language processing very difficult. On the other hand lexical syntactic properties are strongly influenced by lexical semantic structures. Morpho-semantic structures may systematically lead the way to derive lexical senses and syntactic behaviors of lexemes. It was observed that allowable alternations of sentence-patterns for verbs are mainly determined by their lexical semantic structures. It follows that senses and syntactic properties of out-ofvocabulary words become predictable and lexical compositional properties do shed light on automatic Chinese language understanding. Supporting evidences and logical interpretations of semantic and syntactic interactions will be presented in this talk.