Mandarin reduplication meanings revealed by word embedding analysis
Reduplicative constructions in Mandarin: Socio-emotional profiling through distributional semantics
Computation and Language
Summary
Mandarin Chinese uses repeating word patterns called reduplications that can change meaning in subtle ways, like showing plurality or expressing feelings. The authors studied whether computer-generated word meanings from language data, called embeddings, could explain these patterns more clearly. They found that the computer models successfully captured the different meanings and grammatical roles of these repeated words, confirming existing linguistic findings. This shows that word embeddings can help explore complex language features in Mandarin.
What this means in practice
- •For natural language processing engineers: Improve Mandarin language models by incorporating reduplication patterns for more accurate semantic and grammatical understanding.
- •For language technology developers: Enhance Mandarin text analysis tools by using embedding-based profiling to detect nuanced meanings in repeated word constructions.
Authors
Chaoyi Wu, Yu-Hsiang Tseng, R. Harald Baayen
Abstract
Mandarin Chinese has two productive reduplicative constructions that repeat either two-character base words or their constituents (e.g., `in good health', `discuss a bit'). Their varied meanings have been described as realizing plurality, valence coloring, sound symbolism and pragmatic functions. The aim of this study is twofold. A first goal is to clarify whether it is possible to come to a more precise understanding of the variegated semantics of Mandarin reduplication by using word embeddings from distributional semantics. A second goal is to explore how useful embeddings are for understanding the details of a semantically complex word-formation process. We show that the embedding space recovers the semantic and grammatical properties of reduplications previously identified in the literature, validating Tencent embeddings for morphological investigation. Semantic profiling revealed that reduplicative constructions are often strongly represented on multiple dimensions. The two patterns exhibit clear semantic and pragmatic differentiation in distributional space. Procrustes analysis clarified that the overall organization of the base-word space is largely preserved in the reduplication space, with local mismatches highlighting regions of discourse-pragmatic reorganization. Taken together, these results show that high-dimensional word embeddings can recover established linguistic generalizations, and capture the semantic versatility of Mandarin reduplication and constructional transparency.