A system of verbal semantic attributes focused on the syntactic correspondence between Japanese and English

Abstract

This paper proposes a system of 97 verbal semantic attributes for Japanese verbs which considers both dynamic characteristics and the relationship of verbs to cases. These attribute values are used to disambiguate the meanings of all Japanese and English pattern pairs in a Japanese to English transfer pattern dictionary consisting of 15,000 pairs of Japanese valence patterns and equivalent English syntactic structures.

Automatic extraction of rules for anaphora resolution of Japanese zero pronouns from aligned sentence pairs

“…To overcome these kinds of problems, several methods to resolve zero pronouns which consider applications for a practical machine translation system with an unlimited translation target area, have been proposed (Nakaiwa and Ikehara, 1992;Nakaiwa and Ikehara, 1995;. These methods use categorized semantic and pragmatic constraints such as verbal semantic attributes (Nakaiwa et al, 1994) and types of modal expressions and conjunctions as a condition for anaphora resolution of zero pronouns and determine antecedents of zero pronouns depending on the typical category of three types of semantic and pragmatic constraints.…”

“…For this construction, verbal semantic attributes, the types of modal expressions and conjunctions within Japanese syntactic and semantic structure are used for the resolution conditions of Japanese zero pronouns. In the implementation in ALT-J/E, the rules are extracted using the case type of the zero pronoun, the verbal semantic attributes (VSA; 107 categories) of the verb which governs the zero pronoun (Nakaiwa et al, 1994) and categorized types of modal expression (134 categories) in the unit sentence which contains the zero pronoun (Kawai, 1987) and categorized types of conjunction (56 categories) which are directly connected to the unit sentence. For example from aligned sentence pair (1), the rule (3) is extracted from the syntactic and semantic structure (2) in Figure 2.…”

Intrasentential Resolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns using Pragmatic and Semantic Constraints

“…To write these constraints based on types of verbs effectively, we used the 97 verbal semantic attributes (VSA) proposed by Nakaiwa et al (1994). These attribute values were added to the 15,000 patterns in the Japanese to English transfer pattern dictionaries used in our Japanese to English machine translation system, ALT-J/E 1991).…”