A Chinese Corpus for Linguistic Research

The project being reported on is a sub-project of the on-going research of the CKIP (Chinese Knowledge Information Processing) Group. This group was founded by Hsieh Ching-chun in 1986 and is currently directed by Kehjiann Chen and Chu-Ren Huang (Chang et al. 1989, Hsieh et al. 1989, Chen et al. 1991). The CKIP research is divided into three sub-projects according to their goals: 1) An On-line Lexicon for NLP, 2) A Corpus, and 3) A Parser. The suit-projects are designed to create a self-sufficient and mutual supporting environment for Chinese NLI: The corpus will be the database supporting the electronic lexicon, while the lexicon will be the basic reterence for automatically tagging the corpus. Moreover, both the corpus and the lexicon will support the parser. Our parser adopts the unification-based formalism of ICG (information-based Case Grammar, Chen and Huang 199{)), which encodes all grammatical information on each lexical entry. At this point in time, the lexicon consists of a fully automated earlier version with limited grammatical information and an updated version with complete grammatical version for parsing, qtaere are more than 40 thousand entries in the completed electronic dictionary, which is available on-line in "lttiwan and allows basic pattern-matching searches. There is also a PC version with reduced search capacity available from the Industrial 'l~echnology Research Institute, the primary funding agency of this pilot dictionary project. The updated version now contains roughly 30 thousand entries with complete grammatical information and another60 thousand with basic grammatical categories. Manipulation of lexical information such as addition of entries and specification of detailed grammatical information with respect to each attribute is maintained online (Jian and Chen 1991). The completed 90 thousand word lexicon will be our core lexicon fl)r parsing. The hierarchical arrangement will enable us to efficiently add new entries and create special lexicons for sub~lomains.