Predicting Native Chinese Readers’ Perception of Sentence Boundaries in Written Texts

It is well known that sentence boundaries in Mandarin Chinese texts are to some extent flexible and subjective. Sentence boundaries are used parsimoniously in Mandarin Chinese and they often do not occur until the end of a block of clauses and so express the completeness of a meaning or an idea. Nonetheless, our hypothesis is that native Chinese depends on unspoken principles for judging the degree of completeness of meaning within a block of clauses. The concern on perceiving sentence boundaries by Chinese readers is similar as the issue of how Chinese readers segment words boundaries which has been investigated extensively. The former topic has, however, seldom been examined. The concern of our investigation is the kinds of unspoken principles or factors that play a role in detecting sentence boundaries (the practice of periods). Tackling these problems is an essential prerequisite to understanding the nature of this fundamental unit in Chinese, and gaining further insight into how Chinese readers perceive the completeness of meaning in this language. In order to clarify these issues, we conducted the re-punctuation experiments in the two separate groups (the training set vs. the testing set) that use different stimuli. Annotation data was also collected from the stimuli texts annotated by linguistic information at different levels. Logistic regression and the Bayesian statistical methods were then applied so as to test the effects of independent variables on the response variable. It turns out that the syntactic information does not affect the response variable. The logistic regression model works well in making good predictions about the data of the testing set. We propose that the sentence boundaries in Chinese are most probably semantically and textually conceptualized rather than syntactically defined.