Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of paraphrasing a Japanese verbal noun phrase into a noun phrase in the form of “N1 no N2”. The semantic structure of “N1 no N2” can be recognized by supplementing some abbreviated predicate. We deine “deletable verbs” as these abbreviated predicates in two ways. 1. Choose verbs equivalent to the semantic relations of “N1 no N2” using a thesaurus. 2. Choose verbs associated with nouns. If a verb frequently cooccurs with a noun in newspaper articles, it is concluded that the verb is associated with the noun. By defining “deletable verbs” and utilizing a variety of the semantic structure of “N1 no N2”, this paraphrasing is accomplished. The subjective evaluation of our paraphrasing method shows that the precision is 63.8% and the recall is 61.4%. It is also shown that restriction on targets can increase the precision by 82.9%.
