A Measurement of Multi-Level Semantic Relations among Mandarin Lexemes with Radical mu4: A Study based on Dictionary Explanations

In this study, we utilize a quantitative method measuring the Multi-Level Semantic Relations based on 4549 Mandarin lexemes containing the radical mu4 (目). The research is carried out by first extracting all dictionary definitions for all lexemes containing this radical. Then, we consider the different layers of definitions (e.g., the definitions of the keywords in a definition) and measure whether two different mu4 (目) lexemes are related in meanings. It was found that both width (the number of lexemes covered) and depth (the number of levels to be calculated) contribute to the measurement of semantic relatedness. Some seemingly unrelated mu4 (目) lexemes are found related when the depth of definitions increases. The study also compares two sets of results one based on MI value and the other based on t-score. Our findings show that our measurement based on multi-level semantic relations produces better results than MI value does, as a collocation measurement like MI value is less suitable for analyzing semantically related dictionary entries.