This paper describes our preliminary attempt to automatically recognize zero adnominals, a subgroup of zero pronouns, in Japanese discourse. Based on the corpus study, we define and classify what we call “argument-taking nouns (ATNs),” i.e., nouns that can appear with zero adnominals. We propose an ATN recognition algorithm that consists of lexicon-based heuristics, drawn from the observations of our analysis. We finally present the result of the algorithm evaluation and discuss future directions.