This paper describes our project on Japanese compound verbs.Japanese "Verb (adnominal form) + Verb" compounds, which are treated as single verbs, frequently appear in daily communication.They are not sufficiently registered in Japanese dictionaries or thesauri.We are now compiling a list of the synonymous expressions of compound verbs in "compound verb lexicon" built by the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics.We extracted synonymous words and phrases of compound verbs from five hundred million Japanese web corpora.As a result, synonymous expressions of 1800 compound verbs were obtained automatically among 2700 in the "compound verb lexicon".From our data, we observed that some compound verbs represent not only motion but also additional nuances such as an emotional one.In order to reflect the abundant meanings that compound verbs own, we will try to think of a link of synonymous expressions to Japanese wordnet.Concretely, in the case of synonymous phrases, we try to link adverbial expressions which are a part of phrases to the adverbial synset in Japanese wordnet.

We are trying to construct a conceptual system that accurately represents human thoughts by fusing of semantic networks.As semantic networks to fuse, we use the Japanese Wordnet which is a thesaurus made manually based on linguistic intuition and the knowledge acquired automatically from the actual text stored in the huge corpus.Such knowledge are represented as mutual relations of the concepts of words.In order to acquire such relations, we focus on the case relations in sentences and calculate inclusive relations of co-occurrence by using Complementary Similarity Measure.As an application and verification of the conceptual system created, we try to simulate human associations by using the conceptual system.As an experimental result, we found the obvious difference in generated association links between using the semantic network of Japanese Wordnet and using the fused semantic networks with Japanese Wordnet and the acquired mutual relations.

We present a series of experiments designed to compare grammar-based and robust approaches to speech understanding, performed in the context of an Open Source medical speech translation system. We used two versions of the system, one grammar-based and one robust, trained off the same training data, and evaluated them on test data collected using both versions of the system. The experiments were constructed so as to avoid several methodological problems which occurred in earlier work reported in the literature. We found that the grammarbased version gave significantly better results than the robust version, with the difference increasing as subjects became more familiar with the system's coverage. The rate of improvement in subject performance was positively affected by providing them with an intelligent online help system.

In this paper, we present evidence that providing users of a speech to speech translation system for emergency diagnosis (MedSLT) with a tool that helps them to learn the coverage greatly improves their success in using the system. In MedSLT, the system uses a grammar-based recogniser that provides more predictable results to the translation component. The help module aims at addressing the lack of robustness inherent in this type of approach. It takes as input the result of a robust statistical recogniser that performs better for out-of-coverage data and produces a list of in-coverage example sentences. These examples are selected from a defined list using a heuristic that prioritises sentences maximising the number of N-grams shared with those extracted from the recognition result.

As a beginning study on self-organizing a general Japanese semantic map, which will be very useful in natural language processing, particularly in document organization and information retrieval, this paper describes the construction of a semantic map of Japanese nouns mapped according to their adnominal constituents. These maps are not only an important part of a general Japanese semantic map that we aim to construct, but can also be a powerful tool for supporting the analysis of the relation between head nouns and their adnominal constituents, an important issue in studies of Japanese pragmatics.

We exploit and extend the Generative Lexicon Theory to develop a formal description of adnominal constituents in a lexicon which can deal with linguistic phenomena found in Japanese adnominal constituents. We classify the problematic behavior into "static disambiguation" and "dynamic disambiguation" tasks. Static disambiguation can be done using lexical information in a dictionary, whereas dynamic disambiguation requires inferences at the knowledge representation level.