Development of a General-Purpose Categorial Grammar Treebank

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5195–5201 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 5195 Development of a General-Purpose Categorial Grammar Treebank Yusuke Kubota, Koji Mineshima, Noritsugu Hayashi, Shinya Okano NINJAL, Ochanomizu University, The University of Tokyo, idem. {10-2 Midori-cho, Tachikawa; 2-2-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo; 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro}, Tokyo, Japan kubota@ninjal.ac.jp, mineshima.koji@ocha.ac.jp, {hayashi, okano}@phiz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp Abstract This paper introduces ABC Treebank, a general-purpose categorial grammar (CG) treebank for Japanese. It is ‘general-purpose’ in the sense that it is not tailored to a specific variant of CG, but rather aims to offer a theory-neutral linguistic resource (as much as possible) which can be converted to different versions of CG (specifically, CCG and Type-Logical Grammar) relatively easily. In terms of linguistic analysis, it improves over the existing Japanese CG treebank (Japanese CCGBank) on the treatment of certain linguistic phenomena (passives, causatives, and control/raising predicates) for which the lexical specification of the syntactic information reflecting local dependencies turns out to be crucial. In this paper, we describe the underlying ‘theory’ dubbed ABC Grammar that is taken as a basis for our treebank, outline the general construction of the corpus, and report on some preliminary results applying the treebank in a semantic parsing system for generating logical representations of sentences. Keywords: treebank, categorial grammar, Japanese, annotation 1. Introduction This paper reports on the progress of the construction of a general-purpose categorial grammar treebank in Japanese that can be used as a resource in both theoretical linguis- tics and natural language processing. Categorial grammar (CG) is a linguistic theory that is well-known for its explicit and simple syntax-semantics interface and is regarded as one of the most influential linguistic theories that can be used for NLP research with ‘deep’ semantic interpretation that has gained renewed attention in recent years. For a further development of this line of work, it is essential to construct a linguistically valid treebank on CG. However, current corpora based on CG often do not take advantage of linguistically adequate analyses developed in the CG lit- erature, mainly because these corpora are converted from existing resources which do not contain fine-grained anno- tation (Honnibal et al., 2010). We will see that this is also the case with the current Japanese CCGBank (Uematsu et al., 2015), a CG treebank converted from dependency tree- banks (Section 4). To build a linguistically valid Japanese CG treebank, we use a constituency treebank (the Keyaki Treebank) as a source corpus, which has fine-grained anno- tation including predicate-argument structures and empty categories. In this paper, we report the progress of our project and compare our treebank with the current Japanese CCGBank. 2. ABC Grammar as a Categorial Interlangage There are two major lines of research in categorial gram- mar: Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG; (Steedman, 2000)) and Type-Logical Grammar (TLG; (Morrill, 1994; Moortgat, 1997; Kubota and Levine, 2015)). CCG is well- known as one of the few implementable linguistic theories that enable deep semantic analysis (Steedman, 2000; Clark …

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