Abstract
This paper provides a deep analysis of linguistic phenomena related to argument ellipsis, one of central issues for improving the accuracy of Japanese predicate-argument structure analysis. We specifically focus on cases where a target predicate and its ellipsed argument appear in the same sentence, and we categorize instances based on two criteria: a clue annotation by a human annotator and systematic categorization based on both syntactic and semantic structure. We then show both the distribution of instances among the categories and the accuracy for each category achieved by a state-of-the-art system. As a result, we show that 58% of the intra-sentencial zero anaphora are the case when an argument of a target predicate P is shared with another predicate O that is in a direct syntactic dependency relation with the argument. This fact implies that analyzing syntactic and semantic relations between O and P is important for Japanese predicate-argument structure analysis. We also show that the distribution of clue combinations is very broad. Finally, we discovered that not only are there cases where each clue independently increases the certainty, but we also discovered cases where clues became relevant when all of them composed a chain.
