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Buy one get one free: Distant annotation of Chinese tense, event type and modality

We describe a “distant annotation” method where we mark up the semantic tense, event type, and modality of Chinese events via a word-aligned parallel corpus. We first map Chinese verbs to their English counterparts via word alignment, and then annotate the resulting English text spans with coarse-grained categories for semantic tense, event type, and modality that we believe apply to both English and Chinese. Because English has richer morpho-syntactic indicators for semantic tense, event type and modality than Chinese, our intuition is that this distant annotation approach will yield more consistent annotation than if we annotate the Chinese side directly. We report experimental results that show stable annotation agreement statistics and that event type and modality have significant influence on tense prediction. We also report the size of the annotated corpus that we have obtained, and how different domains impact annotation consistency.