Similarities and Differences among Semantic Behaviors of Japanese Adnominal Constituents

Similarities and Differences among Semantic Behaviors of Japanese Adnominal Constituents Kyoko Kanzaki and Qing Ma and Hitoshi Isahara Communications Research Laboratory 588-2, Iwaoka, Iwaoka-cho, Nishi-ku, Kobe, 651-2492, Japan {kanzakilqma[isahara} @crl.go.jp Abstract This paper treats the classification of the se- mantic functions performed by adnominal con- stituents in Japanese, where many parts of speech act as adnominal constituents. In order to establish a formal treatment of the semantic roles, the similarities and differences among ad- nominal constituents, i.e. adjectives and "noun + NO (in English "of + noun")" structures, which have a broad range of semantic func- tions, are discussed. This paper also proposes an objective method of classifying these con- structs using a large amount of linguistic data. The feasibility of this was verified with a self- organizing semantic map based on a neural net- work model. 1 Introduction Pustejovsky (Pustejovsky, 1995) proposed the theory of a generative lexicon as a framework by which meanings of words are expressed in one unified representation. This kind ofgenerativity would be very useful for NLP, especially if it is applicable to the complex semantic structures represented by various modification relations. In our previous research on adjectives (Isahara and Kanzaki, 1999) we used Pustejovsky's the- ory to classify adjectives in Japanese. In this pa- per we take the first steps in a similar classifica- tion of the Japanese "noun + NO" construction. Bouillon (Bouillon, 1996) applied this theory to the adnominal constituent of mental states. Saint-Dizier (Saint-Dizier, 1998) discussed ad- jectives in French. Isahara and Kanzaki (Isahara and Kanzaki, 1999) treated a much wider range of phenom- ena of adnominal constituents. They classified the semantic roles of adnominal constituents in .Japanese. where many parts of speech act as adnominal constituents, and discussed a for- mal treatment of their semantic roles. In their research, adnominal constituents, mainly ad- jectives which function as adverbials, are dis- cussed. The present paper describes the sim- ilarities and differences among adnominal con- stituents, i.e. adjectives and "noun + NO t (in English "of + noun")" structures which have a broad range of semantic functions. This pa- per proposes an objective method for classifying these structures using a large amount of linguis- tic data. The feasibility of this was verified with a self-organizing semantic map based on a neu- ral network model. In section 2, we explain the semantic func- tions performed by "noun + NO." In section 3, we discuss how we can semi-automatically obtain and classify examples of adjectives and "noun + NO" structures which have similar se- mantic functions. In section 4, we introduce a self-organizing semantic map to verify the result of this classification. In section 5, we discuss similarities and differences between adjectives and "noun + NO" structures. 2 The Diversity of Semantic Relations between "noun -t- NO" and their Head Nouns Among Japanese adnominal constituents, " noun + NO" represents a wider range of seman- tic relations than other adnominal constituents. Therefore, "noun + NO" does not always be- have like the other adnominal …

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