Japanese sentence final particles (JSFPs henceforth) are used extremely frequently in utterances. We propose functions of Japanese Sentence Final Particles YO NE and NA that are based on a hierarchal memory model which consists of Long Term Memory, Episodic Memory and Discourse Memory. The proposed functions of JSFPs are basically monitoring functions of the mental process being done in utterance. YO shows that the propositional content of the utterance that ends with YO was already in the speaker's Episodic Memory or Long Term Memory, while NE and NA show that the speaker is processing the propositional contents with the contents of speaker's memory. The proposed functions succeed in accounting for the phenomena yet to be explained in the previous works.

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This paper proposes an automatic digesting system for a Network Newsgroup “fj. wanted”. The key component of the system is the summary extraction from NetNews articles. In the summary extraction, 42 features are detected by using surface language expression patterns. Using these features, the system determines the category of the article and extracts the most important sentence (summary sentence) from the article. A blind test demonstrates that the accuracy of the category detection is 81% and the accuracy of the summary sentence extraction is 76%. The system creates the digest in HyperText Markup Language from the extracted summary sentences. The digest can be accessed via World-Wide Web.

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This paper describes a study on the Japanese classical literary researches by the computer. A model has been developed with a definition and description for the structure of the research process, which is named the FR.(Files for Research) system. The model is considered as the simulation of the research process and organization of materials, information, data, etc., which are widely used in the research processing. Then, a prototype system also has set up to the personal computer, Macintosh, under the FR. model for the feasibility tests. The system designs as an electronic book named the “Soseki in London” based on the substantial model for the Japanese literary work. In the experiments, the book has been evaluated highly, that is, it is available and effective for the researching in the literary work and particularly is useful for educational applications.

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Since complex sentences consist of more than two clauses, we have more than two subjects in one complex sentence. Therefore it is important to recognize coreference relations among these subjects for identifying the referents of these subjects. We focus here on subjects coreference relations of Japanese complex sentences conjoined by node or kara, both of them mean because in English. The reason why this is important is that in Japanese subjects are very frequently omitted, in other words come to be zero subjects. In this circumstance, to resolve zero anaphora is one of key factors for understanding or translating. For this purpose we use semantic features of predicates of main and subordinate clause respectively, and calculate the frequencies for each combination of every semantic feature of subordinate clause and those of main clause. By analyzing these frequencies we find several tendencies, for instance, if a subordinate predicate is linguistic activity like speaking, then the subject of main clause is distinct from the subject of subordinate clause in its referent. We also account for these tendencies based on linguistic and cognitive aspects of human beings.

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In this paper we discuss firstly a method for skeltal syntactic analysis which uses only surface information.By this method we can successfully abstract the skeltal syntactic structure of a long Japanese sentence. Secondly we discuss its use on building a large corpus with skeltal syntactic structure consisting of about 80 thousand example sentences from two Japanese-English dictionaries. Thirdly we discuss our development of a similar sentence retrieval system over this corpus. The advantage of this system is that (1) Syntactic structure as input search pattern enables the system to dismiss unnecessary example sentences. Thus it raises the precision of the sentence retrieval.(2) Similar sentence retrieval realized on the basis of word encoding according to the thesaurus hierarchy.(3) Index table including syntactic information enables the system to make high speed retrieval.(4) The system has an excellent graphical user interface using the triangle representation of syntactic structure.

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