Abstract
In this paper, we describe a rule-based mechanism that detects Japanese term variations from textual corpora. The system operates on the basis of meta-rules that map syntactic and morpho-syntactic variants of terms to the original forms of terms. The framework used here has been successfully applied to such languages as English and French, and we show here that it also works well in detecting Japanese term variants, once we properly take into account specific characteristics of the Japanese language. We also discuss the potential of this work for IR-related applications.
