Learning to Predict Case Markers in Japanese

Japanese case markers, which indicate the grammatical relation of the complement NP to the predicate, often pose challenges to the generation of Japanese text, be it done by a foreign language learner, or by a machine translation (MT) system. In this paper, we describe the task of predicting Japanese case markers and propose machine learning methods for solving it in two settings: (i) monolingual, when given information only from the Japanese sentence; and (ii) bilingual, when also given information from a corresponding English source sentence in an MT context. We formulate the task after the well-studied task of English semantic role labelling, and explore features from a syntactic dependency structure of the sentence. For the monolingual task, we evaluated our models on the Kyoto Corpus and achieved over 84% accuracy in assigning correct case markers for each phrase. For the bilingual task, we achieved an accuracy of 92% per phrase using a bilingual dataset from a technical domain. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Hisami Suzuki, Kristina Toutanova
• Keywords: ACL 2006, ACL 2007, Case Markers, English Source Sentence, Japanese Case Markers