Constructing a Corpus of Japanese Predicate Phrases for Synonym/Antonym Relations

AbstractWe construct a large corpus of Japanese predicate phrases for synonym-antonym relations. The corpus consists of 7,278 pairs of predicates such as “receive-permission (ACC)” vs. “obtain-permission (ACC)”, in which each predicate pair is accompanied by a noun phrase and case information. The relations are categorized as synonyms, entailment, antonyms, or unrelated. Antonyms are further categorized into three different classes depending on their aspect of oppositeness. Using the data as a training corpus, we conduct the supervised binary classification of synonymous predicates based on linguistically-motivated features. Combining features that are characteristic of synonymous predicates with those that are characteristic of antonymous predicates, we succeed in automatically identifying synonymous predicates at the high F-score of 0.92, a 0.4 improvement over the baseline method of using the Japanese WordNet. The results of an experiment confirm that the quality of the corpus is high enough to achieve automatic classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and the largest publicly available corpus of Japanese predicate phrases for synonym-antonym relations.