JACY - a grammar for annotating syntax, semantics and pragmatics of written and spoken japanese for NLP application purposes

In this text, we describe the development of a broad coverage grammar for Japanese that has been built for and used in different application contexts. The grammar is based on work done in the Verbmobil project (Siegel 2000) on machine translation of spoken dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The second application for JACY was the automatic email response task. Grammar development was described in Oepen et al. (2002a). Third, it was applied to the task of understanding material on mobile phones available on the internet, while embedded in the project DeepThought (Callmeier et al. 2004, Uszkoreit et al. 2004). Currently, it is being used for treebanking and ontology extraction from dictionary definition sentences by the Japanese company NTT (Bond et al. 2004)

Negative Structure in Japanese

In this paper, I investigate negative structure in Japanese. The scope of Japanese negation appears to be narrower than that of English, which has lead to different treatment of Japanese and English negation in the literature (e.g., Kuno 1980, 1983, Han et al. 2004, Kataoka 2006, Kishimoto 2008). In contrast, I propose an analysis that maintains the same negative structure for Japanese and English. I demonstrate that all the scope facts regarding negative sentences in Japanese can be accounted for if Japanese has obligatory object movement into a higher domain, above NegP; the difference between Japanese and English is not the structural position of negation but the existence of this obligatory movement in Japanese. With this single negative structure + object movement analysis, I show that all the scope patterns discussed in the paper can be captured without any additional assumptions, and more importantly, that there is no need to assume different negative structure for Japanese any more

Language-Specific Constraints on Scope Interpretation in First Language Acquisition

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of language-specific constraints on scope interpretation by Japanese preschool children. Several constructions in Japanese do not allow scope interpretations that the corresponding English sentences do allow. First, in Japanese transitive sentences with multiple quantificational arguments, an inverse scope interpretation is disallowed, due to the Rigid Scope Constraint. Second, Japanese logical connectives cannot be interpreted under the scope of local negation, due to their Positive Polarity. Thirdly, in Japanese infinitival complement constructions with implicative matrix verbs like wasureru ("forget") the inverse scope interpretation is required, due to the Anti-Reconstruction Constraint. The main goal of this research is to determine how Japanese children learn these constraints on scope interpretations. To that end, three properties of the acquisition task that have an influence on the learnability of linguistic knowledge are examined: productivity, no negative evidence, and arbitrariness. The results of experimental investigations show that Japanese children productively generate scope interpretations that are never exemplified in the input. For example, with sentences that contain two quantificational arguments, Japanese children accessed inverse scope interpretations that Japanese adults do not allow. Also, Japanese children interpret the disjunction ka under the scope of local negation, which is not a possible interpretive option in the adult language. These findings clearly show that children do not acquire these scope constraints through conservative learning, and raise the question of how they learn to purge their non-adult interpretations. It is argued that input data do not provide learners with negative evidence (direct or indirect) against particular scope interpretations. Two inherent properties of input data about possible scope interpretations, data sparseness and indirectness, make negative evidence too unreliable as a basis for discovering what scope interpretation is impossible. In order to solve the learnability problems that children's scope productivity raise, I suggest that the impossibility of their non-adult interpretations are acquired by learning some independently observable properties of the language. In other words, the scope constraints are not arbitrary in the sense that their effects are consequences of other properties of the grammar of Japanese

Predicate union and the syntax of Japanese causatives

This paper presents a monoclausal, multipredicate analysis of Japanese causatives, adopting the fundamental assumptions of Relational Grammar. Evidence is provided for the existence of two distinct classes of causatives, distinguished on the basis of the agentivity of the matrix subject. It is also demonstrated that the surface case marking of the causee is constrained by its relative status to the matrix subject with respect to a set of Proto-Agent entailments (as proposed in Dowty 1991)