Abstract
It is well known that the frequency of phrase-pairs in modifier-modified relation depends on the distance between the phrases constituting the pair in the Japanese language.That is, a phrase in a sentence modifies its immediate successor most frequently, and the frequency of modification decreases as the distance between the modifier phrase and the modified phrase increases unless the modified phrase is the last one in the sentence.This paper discusses a method of exploiting this statistical knowledge for dependency analysis of Japanese sentences.The minimum total penalty method was used for dependency analysis in this work. The method requires a penalty function, which specifies the association strength between phrases.Several penalty functions were defined based on the frequency distribution of dependency distance extracted from ATR 503-sentence corpus, and the analysis performances were compared.Another experiment was conducted by using a deterministic dependency analysis method for comparison.It is concluded that the knowledge of the dependency distance distribution is effective, and that detailed knowledge of the dependency distance distribution extracted for each modifier phrase group is still more effective for improving the analysis performance.
