This study shows the effectiveness of structure modeling for transfer ability in diachronic syntactic parsing. The syntactic parsing for historical languages is significant from a humanities and quantitative linguistics perspective to enable annotation support and analysis on unannotated documents.We compared the zero-shot transfer ability between Transformer-based Biaffine UD parsers and our structure modeling approach. The structure modeling approach is a pipeline method consisting with dictionary-based morphological analysis (MeCab), a deep learning-based phrase (bunsetsu) analysis (Monaka), SVM-based phrase dependency parsing (CaboCha) and a rule-based conversion from phrase dependencies to UD.This pipeline closely follows the methodology used in constructing Japanese UD corpora.Experimental results showed that the structure modeling approach outperformed zero-shot transfer from the contemporary to the modern Japanese. Moreover, the structure modeling approach outperformed several existing UD parsers in contemporary Japanese. To this end, the structure modeling approach outperformed in the diachronic transfer of Japanese by a wide margin and was useful to those applications for digital humanities and quantitative linguistics.

In Japanese, the natural minimal phrase of a sentence is the “bunsetsu” and it serves as a natural boundary of a sentence for native speakers rather than words, and thus grammatical analysis in Japanese linguistics commonly operates on the basis of bunsetsu units.In contrast, because Japanese does not have delimiters between words, there are two major categories of word definition, namely, Short Unit Words (SUWs) and Long Unit Words (LUWs).Though a SUW dictionary is available, LUW is not.Hence, this study focuses on providing deep learning-based (or LLM-based) bunsetsu and Long Unit Words analyzer for the Heian period (AD 794-1185) and evaluating its performances.We model the parser as transformer-based joint sequential labels model, which combine bunsetsu BI tag, LUW BI tag, and LUW Part-of-Speech (POS) tag for each SUW token.We train our models on corpora of each period including contemporary and historical Japanese.The results range from 0.976 to 0.996 in f1 value for both bunsetsu and LUW reconstruction indicating that our models achieve comparable performance with models for a contemporary Japanese corpus.Through the statistical analysis and diachronic case study, the estimation of bunsetsu could be influenced by the grammaticalization of morphemes.

This paper presents machine translation from historical Japanese to contemporary Japanese using a Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5). The result of the previous study that used neural machine translation (NMT), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), could not outperform that of the work that used statistical machine translation (SMT). Because an NMT model tends to require more training data than an SMT model, the lack of parallel data of historical and contemporary Japanese could be the reason. Therefore, we used Japanese T5, a kind of large language model to compensate for the lack of data. Our experiments show that the translation with T5 is slightly lower than SMT. In addition, we added the title of the literature book from which the example sentence was extracted at the beginning of the input. Japanese historical corpus consists of a variety of texts ranging in periods when the texts were written and the writing styles. Therefore, we expected that the title gives information about the period and style, to the translation model. Additional experiments revealed that, with title information, the translation from historical Japanese to contemporary Japanese with T5 surpassed that with SMT.

In this paper, we show how to use bilingual word embeddings (BWE) to automatically create a corresponding table of meaning tags from two dictionaries in one language and examine the effectiveness of the method. To do this, we had a problem: the meaning tags do not always correspond one-to-one because the granularities of the word senses and the concepts are different from each other. Therefore, we regarded the concept tag that corresponds to a word sense the most as the correct concept tag corresponding the word sense. We used two BWE methods, a linear transformation matrix and VecMap. We evaluated the most frequent sense (MFS) method and the corpus concatenation method for comparison. The accuracies of the proposed methods were higher than the accuracy of the random baseline but lower than those of the MFS and corpus concatenation methods. However, because our method utilized the embedding vectors of the word senses, the relations of the sense tags corresponding to concept tags could be examined by mapping the sense embeddings to the vector space of the concept tags. Also, our methods could be performed when we have only concept or word sense embeddings whereas the MFS method requires a parallel corpus and the corpus concatenation method needs two tagged corpora.

Fine-tuning is a popular method to achieve better performance when only a small target corpus is available. However, it requires tuning of a number of metaparameters and thus it might carry risk of adverse effect when inappropriate metaparameters are used. Therefore, we investigate effective parameters for fine-tuning when only a small target corpus is available. In the current study, we target at improving Japanese word embeddings created from a huge corpus. First, we demonstrate that even the word embeddings created from the huge corpus are affected by domain shift. After that, we investigate effective parameters for fine-tuning of the word embeddings using a small target corpus. We used perplexity of a language model obtained from a Long Short-Term Memory network to assess the word embeddings input into the network. The experiments revealed that fine-tuning sometimes give adverse effect when only a small target corpus is used and batch size is the most important parameter for fine-tuning. In addition, we confirmed that effect of fine-tuning is higher when size of a target corpus was larger.