Building a Chinese Lexical Taxonomy

In this paper, we present a Chinese lexical taxonomy, a hierarchically organization of Chinese lexical classes of nouns, verbs and adjectives. We first describe the structure of this taxonomy and then present the methods we used to build it. The distinctive characteristics of this lexical taxonomy are: 1) we use definition frame to describe each lexical class, as well as its members, 2) the lexical classes for nouns, verbs and adjectives are inter-connected. We also compare this taxonomy with the Chinese Proposition Bank, to look for possible ways to link these two independently developed language resources.