@InProceedings{mao-hulden:2016:COLING,
  author    = {Mao, Lingshuang  and  Hulden, Mans},
  title     = {How Regular is Japanese Loanword Adaptation? A Computational Study},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers},
  month     = {December},
  year      = {2016},
  address   = {Osaka, Japan},
  publisher = {The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee},
  pages     = {847--856},
  abstract  = {The modifications that foreign loanwords undergo when adapted into Japanese
	have been the subject of much study in linguistics.  The scholarly interest of
	the topic can be attributed to the fact that Japanese loanwords undergo a
	complex series of phonological adaptations, something which has been puzzling
	scholars for decades. While previous studies of Japanese loanword accommodation
	have focused on specific phonological phenomena of limited scope, the current
	study leverages computational methods to provide a more complete description of
	all the sound changes that occur when adopting English words into Japanese.  To
	investigate this, we have developed a parallel corpus of 250 English
	transcriptions and their respective Japanese equivalents. These words were then
	used to develop a wide-coverage finite state transducer based phonological
	grammar that mimics the behavior of the Japanese adaption process.  By
	developing rules with the goal of accounting completely for a large number of
	borrowing and analyzing forms mistakenly generated by the system, we discovered
	an internal inconsistency inside the loanword phonology of the Japanese
	language, something arguably underestimated by previous studies. The result of
	the investigation suggests that there are multiple 'dimensions' that shape the
	output form of the current Japanese loanwords. These dimensions include
	orthography, phonetics, and historical changes.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/C16-1081}
}