We present an attempt to port the international syntactic annotation scheme, Universal Dependencies, to the Japanese language in this paper. Since the Japanese syntactic structure is usually annotated on the basis of unique chunk-based dependencies, we first introduce word-based dependencies by using a word unit called the Short Unit Word, which usually corresponds to an entry in the lexicon UniDic. Porting is done by mapping the part-of-speech tagset in UniDic to the universal part-of-speech tagset, and converting a constituent-based treebank to a typed dependency tree. The conversion is not straightforward, and we discuss the problems that arose in the conversion and the current solutions. A treebank consisting of 10,000 sentences was built by converting the existent resources and currently released to the public.
@InProceedings{TANAKA16.122,
author = {Takaaki Tanaka and Yusuke Miyao and Masayuki Asahara and Sumire Uematsu and Hiroshi Kanayama and Shinsuke Mori and Yuji Matsumoto}, title = {Universal Dependencies for Japanese}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper