Constructing Taxonomy of Numerative Classifiers for Asian Languages

Numerative classifiers are ubiquitous in many Asian languages. This paper proposes a method to construct a taxonomy of numerative classifiers based on a nounclassifier agreement database. The taxonomy defines superordinate-subordinate relation among numerative classifiers and represents the relations in tree structures. The experiments to construct taxonomies were conducted for evaluation by using data from three different languages: Chinese, Japanese and Thai. We found that our method was promising for Chinese and Japanese, but inappropriate for Thai. It confirms that there really is no hierarchy among Thai classifiers.