Usage classification of te-form subordinate clauses in Japanese

Abstract

Te-form subordinate clauses are common expressions in Japanese that show multiple usages; thus, it is an important task in natural language processing to automatically determine the usage of these clauses. In this study, we designed an annotation guideline and manually classified the usage of te-form subordinate clauses. Various classifications have been proposed regarding te-form subordinate clauses. However, in attempts to create annotation guidelines, it tends to be difficult for non-linguist to make consistent judgments. Therefore, we design an annotation guideline using "linguistic tests." Linguistic tests include operations such as determining whether a target expression can be paraphrased, which we claim to reduce the variations of judgments. Moreover, we implement and train a neural classifier based on the BERT language model using the annotated corpus, which automatically classify the usage of te-forms.