J-UniMorph: Japanese Morphological Annotation through the Universal Feature Schema

Kosuke Matsuzaki, Masaya Taniguchi, Kentaro Inui, Keisuke Sakaguchi


Abstract
We introduce a Japanese Morphology dataset, J-UniMorph, developed based on the UniMorph feature schema. This dataset addresses the unique and rich verb forms characteristic of the language’s agglutinative nature. J-UniMorph distinguishes itself from the existing Japanese subset of UniMorph, which is automatically extracted from Wiktionary. On average, the Wiktionary Edition features around 12 inflected forms for each word and is primarily dominated by denominal verbs (i.e., [noun] + suru (do-PRS)). Morphologically, this inflection pattern is same as the verb suru (do). In contrast, J-UniMorph explores a much broader and more frequently used range of verb forms, offering 118 inflected forms for each word on average. It includes honorifics, a range of politeness levels, and other linguistic nuances, emphasizing the distinctive characteristics of the Japanese language. This paper presents detailed statistics and characteristics of J-UniMorph, comparing it with the Wiktionary Edition. We will release J-UniMorph and its interactive visualizer publicly available, aiming to support cross-linguistic research and various applications.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigmorphon-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Garrett Nicolai, Eleanor Chodroff, Frederic Mailhot, Çağrı Çöltekin
Venue:
SIGMORPHON
SIG:
SIGMORPHON
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7–19
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigmorphon-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.sigmorphon-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kosuke Matsuzaki, Masaya Taniguchi, Kentaro Inui, and Keisuke Sakaguchi. 2024. J-UniMorph: Japanese Morphological Annotation through the Universal Feature Schema. In Proceedings of the 21st SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 7–19, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
J-UniMorph: Japanese Morphological Annotation through the Universal Feature Schema (Matsuzaki et al., SIGMORPHON 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigmorphon-1.2.pdf