Derivational Grammar Approach to Morphological Analysis of Japanese Sentences

Yasuhiro Ogawa, Muhtar Mahsut, Katsuhiko Toyama, Yasuyoshi Inagaki

Abstract: This paper proposes a new simple Japanese morphological analysis system which we call MAJO. Of course, many Japanese morphological analyses have been proposed and used in the wide area of Japanese language processing. But they are rather complicated because their analysis methods are based on conjugations of verbs and adjectives. On the other hand, it is known that the derivational grammar, which does not use the concept of conjugations, makes morphological analysis simple. Although there are some literatures which discuss Japanese morphological analysis used derivational grammar, all of them has modified their grammar to utilize existing systems. MAJO is constructed directly from the derivational grammar, so that it has a smaller number of grammar rules than the previous systems. We have evaluated its performance on the EDR corpus and MAJO succeeded with 97.9% ratio.