Regional Variation of Domain-Specific Lexical Items: Toward a Pan-Chinese Lexical Resource

This paper reports on an initial and necessary step toward the construction of a Pan-Chinese lexical resource. We investigated the regional variation of lexical items in two specific domains, finance and sports; and explored how much of such variation is covered in existing Chinese synonym dictionaries, in particular the Tongyici Cilin. The domain-specific lexical items were obtained from subsections of a synchronous Chinese corpus, LIVAC. Results showed that 20-40% of the words from various subcorpora are unique to the individual communities, and as much as 70% of such unique items are not yet covered in the Tongyici Cilin. The results suggested great potential for building a Pan-Chinese lexical resource for Chinese language processing. Our next step would be to explore automatic means for extracting related lexical items from the corpus, and to incorporate them into existing semantic classifications.