Paraphrasing Japanese Light Verb Constructions: Towards the Normalization of Complex Predicates

摘要

We introduce novel paraphrasing rules for Japanese light verb constructions (LVCs) that reduce the differences in the surface forms while retaining several of the crucial syntactic/semantic functions of these light verbs. An analysis of the linguistic properties of light verbs allows us to create paraphrasing patterns that map 151 different light verbs into 10 simple forms. Of these 10 forms, 7 convert complex noun-particle-verb structures into simple predicative forms. By constructing a list of 923 examples for ambiguous light verbs, we show that we can correctly distinguish real LVCs from those in which the light verbs were actually functioning as a main verb. The results of experiments indicate that our paraphrasing rules offer high accuracy. The experiments also reveal that our paraphrasing system works as a normalizer of complex predicates, which improves the recall rate of the predicate extraction task.