Information-Structure Annotation of the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese”

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This paper presents a contrastive analysis between reading time and clause boundary categories in the Japanese language in order to estimate text readability. We overlaid reading time data of BCCWJ EyeTrack, and clause boundary categories annotation on the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. Statistical analysis based on the Bayesian linear mixed model shows that the reading time behaviours differ among the clause boundary categories. The result does not support the wrapup effects of clause-final words. Another result we arrived at is that the predicateargument relations facilitate the reading speed of native Japanese speakers.

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Reading Time and Clause Boundaries in Japanese—Wrap-up Effect in a Head-Final Language—

正幸

2019

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“…This subsection presents information structure annotation. The detailed explanation is in (Miyauchi et al, 2017) We set the following seven labelset for the NP segments:…”

Section: Information Structure Annotationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Reading Time and the Information Status of Noun Phrases

Asahara

2018

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Japanese noun phrases are not marked by articles. The information status of Japanese noun phrases is not overt. Due to limited contextual information and world knowledge, it is difficult to estimate the information status, which is analyzed through the given/new status or indefinite/definite status. However, in Japanese language processing, the notion of the information status is yet to be understood. In this paper, we explain the information status of Japanese noun phrases. Then, we explore how the information status of Japanese noun phrases is estimated through the reading time. As a first step, we investigate the correlation between reading time and the information status of Japanese noun phrases. The statistical evaluation shows that readers' information status affects reading time in Japanese.

Statistical Study of a Correlation between Information Structure and Word Orders of Noun Phrases in Japanese

Miyauchi

Asahara

2020

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The aim of this paper is to investigate how grammatical information regarding information structure effects word orders. We report results of modeling distances between NPs and predicates on which they depend by the Bayesian linear mixed model, using "BCCWJ-InfoStr," where tags regarding information structure are annotated to NPs in the text of "Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese."As a result, estimated word orders of noun phrases in a sentence are as follows: (I) discourse-old NPs precede discourse-new NPs, (II) hearer-old NPs precede hearer-new NPs, (III) definite NPs precede indefinite NPs, and (IV) animate NPs precede inanimate NPs. These results support "Communicative Dynamism," "From-Old-To-New Principle," and "Nominal Hierarchy," referred to in the field of functional linguistics.