Determining the Antecedent of Noun Phrase Containing the Determiner KONO or SONO in Japanese

DETERMINING THE ANTECEDENT OF NOUN PHRASE CONTAINING THE DETERMINER KONO OR SONO IN JAPANESE Toshimasa Koga, Haodong Wu, Teiji Furugori Dept. of Computer Science University of Electro-Communications Chofu, Tokyo, Japan Email: furugori@cs.uec.ac.jp ABSTRACT This paper offers a method for determining referent (antecedent) of the noun phrase containing determiner "kono (this)" or "sono (that, its)" in Japanese. It uses in the determination of the antecedent a statistical measure of conceptual similarities, taken from a corpus, between each candidate for the antecedent and the modeficand of kono or sono. We describe our method and an algorithm. We then show an experiment that has given us an overall success rate of 85.2%. Our method is applicable to solve other semantic problems than that for finding the antecedent of noun phrase containing the determiner kono or sono. 1. INTRODUCTION Reference problems are a central issue in natural language processing. For instance, we need to understand the antecedents of pronouns in translating one language into another. Consider: Someone killed Jim. The police have no suspect, but they think that he or she needed money and knew that he was a wealthy man. He walked in the house with a big suitcase and put the money in it. We will not be able to translate the sentences into, say, Japanese when we are uncertain of what the pronouns like he, she, they, and it in this text are referring to. A pronoun refers to a linguistic object in the preceding or succeeding sentences. In the sequence, Clinton visited Japan. He gave a talk at a university. the second sentence is connected to the first one by He (personal pronoun) referring to Clinton (its antecedent). The same relation holds in: Clinton visited Japan. The president gave a talk at a university. Here, the noun president refers to Clinton. In this paper we try to devise a method for determining antecedent of the noun phrase containing determiner "kono (this)" or "sono (that, its)" in Japanese. 2. REFERENCE PROBLEMS AND COMPUTATION 2.1 Determiners Kano and Sono in Japanese A pronoun may refer to an entity (noun) or an event (part of sentence or whole sentence). Similarly, the determiner like this or that together with its modeficand refers to an event or an entity. In the sequence of sentences: I saw the latest work of Kurosawa. This movie was so good. the noun phrase this movie refers to the latest work of Kurosawa. We frequently use the noun phrase containing determiners kono (this) and sono (that) in Japanese. It refers to a linguistic object mentioned in the same or a preceding sentence: (a) g Pk] op WV' HT 44:0-V1-71tSt�a'. (b)(A liver transplant was performed in a hospital in Tokyo. This surgery was successful.) .-0)M4141J*1,),, (There is a house on the hill. That (Its) roof is red.) (c) —440AtHeAttiEl*Wittabk:. &MI�< (A fighter plane flew over the air of Japan. The government considered this invasion very serious.) (d)tP13U0Q-Dtzto f.MtflAtl e t/C�� z 0 (Taro beat the man. I know why he has …

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