Anaphora Resolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns with Deictic Reference

Summary

Japanese often drops subjects and objects that English requires. A Japanese-to-English MT system must therefore supply referents for these "zero pronouns", including those that point outside the text, such as the speaker or the reader. Nakaiwa and Shirai examined a functional test set built for evaluating Japanese-to-English MT. Most omitted elements in it had no antecedent in the sentence. Many of them referred deictically to I/we or you, or to an unspecified human or "it".

The authors propose resolving these cases with a small, domain-independent set of rules that combine four kinds of constraints:

semantic restrictions on verb cases,
modal expressions (e.g., wish forms point to I, obligation forms point to you),
verbal semantic attributes (VSA), such as giving/receiving and motion verbs,
conjunction types, which govern which cases clauses share.

The method was built into the ALT-J/E system and tested on the sentences used to write the rules (a window test). It resolved every deictic zero pronoun correctly. This suggests that modest knowledge resources can handle extrasentential reference in practical MT, although blind tests were still pending.

Key points

Test set of 3718 sentences: 512 zero pronouns in 463 sentences. In 373 cases (73%) the referent was absent from the sentence. Of these, 173 could be avoided by translating in the passive, and 200 needed a deictic or unexpressed referent (69 referring to I/we, 28 to you).
The rules use the 97 verbal semantic attributes (VSA) of Nakaiwa et al. (1994), together with modal and conjunction constraints. The conjunction constraints build on Minami's A/B/C conjunction classes.
In the window test, 46 rules resolved all 175 deictic zero pronouns in ALT-J/E.
Adding VSA improved accuracy as much as adding modal expressions (41 cases, 24%). Without conjunction constraints, accuracy reached 85%.
The authors scored rule complexity by weighting conjunction constraints double. Rules with complexity ≤3 achieved 90% accuracy, and rules with complexity ≤4 achieved 95%.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cited by

17 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 5 of them have a page here, 12 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{nakaiwa1996anaphora,
  title = {{Anaphora Resolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns with Deictic Reference}},
  author = {Nakaiwa, Hiromi and Shirai, Satoshi},
  booktitle = {COLING 1996 Volume 2: The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1996},
  doi = {10.3115/993268.993309},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/993268.993309}
}

References

10 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1(o@ l)ousaMt. 19!)4. identifying the I{.efer-cnts if Japanese Z(,ro-l}ronouns bLsed on l)rag - marie (hm(lition Interpretation. In 7~nns. of l 1",5' Japan, 35( 10):768 778. In Japaliese. Satoru Ikehara, Masahiro Miyazaki and Akio Yokoo. 11991. Semand(" Analysis l)ictionary lot Machine Translation.… find
Satoru Ikehara, Shirai Satoshi, Akio Yokoo ~md tliromi Na.hiwa. 1991. 'l'oward M'I' system widlout 1}re-Editing -Elects of New Methods in A I a ' - J / 1 , ; - . I n Pro\< of MT Summit 111, pages 101-106. find
Megumi Kameyama. 1985. A property-sharing (:onstraint in centering. In 2/~lh Annual Meeling of A CL, pages 200-206. find
Akio Kmnio. 1988. I)~nwa ni okem Shiten. find
Nihon-go gaku, 4:(12):10-21. Taishukan Publ. Co., Tokyo. In Japanese. find
Susumu Kuno. 1978. l_)anwa no Bunl)oo. Taishukan Publ. Co., Tokyo. In Japan{'se. i"ujio Minami. 1974. Gendai Nihon-go no Kouzou. T a i s h u h n Publ. Co., Tokyo. In Japanese. ] l-Co,~¢:fiSi~ ---- (iq - - --~8-~o-~T{) 6,t -- ~]?,ZT+-gg%T~T--~o a3 - ~) - -- -(q;f)[-iT}~-T:iT -~7 find
V-_ £ - 7 T~I--7 ~° - " \<~ Accuracy Li _ 6~)--(1~-Ft1~) ~%(-t72a%)--07JT(q~q41~)Y ] & Z ~5~l,,~-......... ) . . . . . . . . . . . 3o +Ak!L - 8.~%(+1%) (14'.}(-H)) ltirmni N+d~aiw++ and Satoru lkehm:a.. 1992. Z e r o l}ronoun l{esolul, ion in a ilapa.nese-to-English Machine Translation System by usin… find
Yukinori ']'akul)o. 1987. Tougo Kouzou to Bum myaku ,/youhou. Nihon-go gaku, 4(12):1.0 21. In Japanese. find
Marilyn Walker, Masayo lida ~nd Sharon Cote. 1990. Centering in Jat}an('se l)iscourse. In Proc. of COLING90. find
Kei Yoshimoto. 1988. hlentifying Zero Pronouns in Japanese ])ialogue. ]in Proc. of COLING88, pages 779 784. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/nakaiwa-1996-anaphora-resolution-japanese-zero-pronouns/

📄 Anaphora Resolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns with Deictic Reference