Lexical Gaps and Lexicalization: Implications for Word Segmentation Systems for Chinese NLP

This paper is motivated by the observation that not all adjectives in Chinese have a canonical antonym. For example, most Chinese speakers choose to translate the English word dishonest into a word string bu chengshi ‘not honest’ instead of any antonym candidates of chengshi suggested in antonym dictionaries. Our discourse evidence from corpus data suggests that bu chengshi is evolving into a word in discourse at a faster pace than some other ‘bu + adjective’ strings, and this may result from the lexical gap for a canonical antonym of chengshi and the communicative need for such a word. As a consequence, it is proposed that if the lexicalization process of bu chengshi continues in the future, the string may need to be considered a single word in a segmentation system (i.e., buchengshi ‘dishonest’). For a segmentation system to distinguish between words and phrases, discourse factors should be taken into consideration.