The Determination of Chinese Pivotal Sentences Based on Semantic Entailment

Pivotal Sentence is a hot topic in the study on contemporary Chinese grammar. Researchers have put more attention on the definition, yardstick and necessity of the use of this term. Moreover, pivotal sentences have been annotated quite differently in different annotation schemes. Up to date, the determination and differentiation standard for Chinese pivotal sentences are still open topics. Based on building a Chinese dependency tree bank, this paper focused on the definition and yardstick of pivotal sentences, which was based on entailment test. Through this test, pivotal sentences can be differentiated manually from several other relevant sentence patterns and then a list of pivotal verbs in Chinese was given.