Universal Dependencies Version 2 for Japanese

Masayuki Asahara, Hiroshi Kanayama, Takaaki Tanaka, Yusuke Miyao, Sumire Uematsu, Shinsuke Mori, Yuji Matsumoto, Mai Omura, Yugo Murawaki

Abstract: The Universal Dependencies (UD) project (McDonald et al., 2013) has defined a consistent, crosslinguistic target and syntactic structure representation format. In this presentation, we will show the work of the UD Japanese team. The UD Japanese team was organised by interested people who are developing their own treebanks or parsers. We developed and maintained several UD guidelines (version 2.0) compatible data for Japanese. Most of the data are made through automatic conversion from the existing treebank. The UD annotation guideline was updated from version 1 to version 2 in early 2017. The automatic conversion enabled us to adapt the existing annotation based on traditional Japanese grammar conventions for the UD annotation guideline changes. In this paper, we discuss the current issues of UD Japanese resources until today. These issues come from the difficulty to perform cross-linguistically consistent annotation for the different grammatical system from western European languages. The points at the issues related to the conversions are split into the delimitation (word, phrase and clause), undefined policies of UD guideline, typological systems for UD, and copyright of Japanese language resources.