Semantic Structure Analysis of Japanese Noun Phrases With Adnominal Particles

SEMANTIC STRUCTURE ANALYSIS OF JAPANESE NOUN PHRASES WITH ADNOMINAL PARTICLES Akira SHIMAZU, Shozo NAITO, and Hirosato NOMURA Basic Research Laboratories, N.T.T. 3-9-11, Midori-cho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo 180, Japan Abstract Japanese has many noun phrase patterns of the type A no B consisting of two nouns A and B with an adnominal particle no. As the semantic relations between the two nouns in the noun phrase are not made explicit, the interpretation of the phrases depends mainly on the semantic characteristics of the nouns. This paper describes the semantic diversity of A no B and a method of semantic analysis for such phrases based on feature unification. 1. Introduction Japanese has many noun phrase patterns of the type A no B. The noun phrase pattern, which consists of two nouns A and B with an adnominal particle no, and which has at least the same ambiguity as B of A (and some additional ambiguities not found with the equivalent English construction), does not express any explicit semantic relations between the two nouns. Consequently, its interpretation depends mainly on the semantic characteristics of the nouns. Further- more, phrase patterns NI no N2 no ... no Nn often appear. Because the number of possible dependencies between the constituents is 2 "'I (2n-3)l! / n!, semantic analysis of such phrases is necessary to resolve the ambiguities. To date, there have been no adequate analyses for this linguistic phenomenon, nor have there been any clear methodological proposals for its semantic analysis. This paper describes a) the semantic diversity of A no B, b) the analysis of the semantic structure for A no B by a unification-based method of semantic function application, c) typical semantic structures of A no B, d) the possibility of paraphrasing A no B as a noun phrase with a relative clause by the addition of a verb, and e) the resolution of ambiguities using contextual informa- tion from the viewpoint of relation between A no B and its corresponding relative clause. Although A no B is a simple fo~n, it is interesting in two respects. First, A no B represents a general linguistic problem for semantic processing. The reason is that, in some cases, A or B is a noun form derived from a verb or adjective, thus necessitating the seman- tic processing of verbs and adjectives. Second, A no B can be paraphrased as a noun phrase with a relative clause, in just the same way as some English complex nominals [3, 5]. Putting it another way, as information is condensed into a simple expression, there are ambiguities as to the semantic relations between the two nouns. Consequently, contextual analysis plays a crucial part in the resolution of the ambiguities. 2. Semantic Diversity of A no B A no B is frequently found in Japanese sentences. An exsmlnation of scientific and newspaper articles showed that the occurrence of A no B accounts for about half the total number of noun phrases in a text ill]. The other occurrences are noun phrases …

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