We constructed a database of Japanese expressions based on route information. Using 20 maps as stimuli, we requested descriptions of routes between two points on each map from 40 individuals per route, collecting 1600 route information reference expressions. We determined whether the expressions were based solely on relative reference expressions by using landmarks on the maps. In cases in which only relative reference expressions were used, we labeled the presence or absence of information regarding the starting point, waypoints, and destination. Additionally, we collected clarity ratings for each expression using a survey.

In this study, we have developed Universal Dependencies (UD) resources for spoken Japanese in the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC). The CEJC is a large corpus of spoken language that encompasses various everyday conversations in Japanese, and includes word delimitation and part-of-speech annotation. We have newly annotated Long Word Unit delimitation and Bunsetsu (Japanese phrase)-based dependencies, including Bunsetsu boundaries, for CEJC. The UD of Japanese resources was constructed in accordance with hand-maintained conversion rules from the CEJC with two types of word delimitation, part-of-speech tags and Bunsetsu-based syntactic dependency relations. Furthermore, we examined various issues pertaining to the construction of UD in the CEJC by comparing it with the written Japanese corpus and evaluating UD parsing accuracy.

In this paper, we describe a corpus UD Japanese-BCCWJ that was created by converting the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), a Japanese language corpus, to adhere to the UD annotation schema. The BCCWJ already assigns dependency information at the level of the bunsetsu (a Japanese syntactic unit comparable to the phrase). We developed a program to convert the BCCWJ to UD based on this dependency structure, and this corpus is the result of completely automatic conversion using the program. UD Japanese-BCCWJ is the largest-scale UD Japanese corpus and the second-largest of all UD corpora, including 1,980 documents, 57,109 sentences, and 1,273k words across six distinct domains.