The Effect of Rhythm on Structural Disambiguation in Chinese

The length of a constituent (number of syllables in a word or number of words in a phrase), or rhythm, plays an important role in Chinese syntax. This paper systematically surveys the distribution of rhythm in constructions in Chinese from the statistical data acquired from a shallow tree bank. Based on our survey, we then used the rhythm feature in a practical shallow parsing task by using rhythm as a statistical feature to augment a PCFG model. Our results show that using the probabilistic rhythm feature significantly improves the performance of our shallow parser.