Abstract
Semantic resources have been developed for effective searching of agricultural information. This paper outlines these resource. In 2002, we translated about 27,300 terms of AGROVOC into Japanese. AGROVOC is a multilingual thesaurus covering all of the fields in Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries and related domains, which was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Commission of the European Communities. This Japanese agricultural thesaurus has been developed as an addition to AGROVOC, because there are only a few Japan-specific agricultural terms available in AGROVOC. The Japan agricultural thesaurus contains of about 35,000 terms written in English, Japanese and hiragana. It has both equivalence and broader/ narrower term relationships between terms. A morpheme dictionary has been developed based on the Japan agricultural thesaurus for analyzing morphemes of an input sentence. The dictionary consists of terms written in Japanese and hiragana, and information on the fluctuation of the description.
