Tomohiro Ohno

Dependency Parsing of Japanese Spoken Monologue Based on Clause Boundaries

In applications of spoken monologue processing such as simultaneous machine interpretation and real-time captions generation, incremental language parsing is strongly required. This paper proposes a technique for incremental dependency parsing of Japanese spoken monologue on a clause-by-clause basis. The technique identifies the clauses based on clause boundaries analysis, analyzes the dependency structures of them, and tries to decide the dependency relations with another clauses, simultaneously with the monologue speech input. The dependency relations are generated at the stage before the input of the entire monologue, and therefore, our technique can be used for language parsing in simultaneous Japanese speech understanding. An experiment using Japanese monologues has shown that our technique had the same degree of the performance as the usual dependency parsing for monologue sentences.

Linefeed Insertion into Japanese Spoken Monologue for Captioning

To support the real-time understanding of spoken monologue such as lectures and commentaries, the development of a captioning system is required. In monologues, since a sentence tends to be long, each sentence is often displayed in multi lines on one screen, it is necessary to insert linefeeds into a text so that the text becomes easy to read. This paper proposes a technique for inserting linefeeds into a Japanese spoken monologue text as an elemental technique to generate the readable captions. Our method appropriately inserts linefeeds into a sentence by machine learning, based on the information such as dependencies, clause boundaries, pauses and line length. An experiment using Japanese speech data has shown the effectiveness of our technique.

Spiral construction of syntactically annotated spoken language corpus

Spontaneous speech includes a broad range of linguistic phenomena characteristic of spoken language, and therefore a statistical approach would be effective for robust parsing of spoken language. Though a large-scale syntactically annotated corpus is required for the stochastic parsing, its construction requires a lot of human resources. We propose a method of efficiently constructing a spoken language corpus for which the dependency analysis is provided. This method uses an existing spoken language corpus. A stochastic dependency parse is employed to tag spoken language sentences with the dependency structures, and the results are corrected manually. The tagged corpus is constructed in a spiral fashion where in the corrected data is utilized as the statistical information for automatic parsing of other data. Taking this spiral approach reduces the parsing errors, also allowing us to reduce the correction cost. An experiment using 10995 Japanese utterances shows the spiral approach to be effective for efficient corpus construction.

Dependency parsing of Japanese monologue using clause boundaries

Spoken monologues feature greater sentence length and structural complexity than spoken dialogues. To achieve high-parsing performance for spoken monologues, simplifying the structure by dividing a sentence into suitable language units could prove effective. This paper proposes a method for dependency parsing of Japanese spoken monologues based on sentence segmentation. In this method, dependency parsing is executed in two stages: at the clause level and the sentence level. First, dependencies within a clause are identified by dividing a sentence into clauses and executing stochastic dependency parsing for each clause. Next, dependencies across clause boundaries are identified stochastically, and the dependency structure of the entire sentence is thus completed. An experiment using a spoken monologue corpus shows the effectiveness of this method for efficient dependency parsing of Japanese monologue sentences.

Automatic Linefeed Insertion for Improving Readability of Lecture Transcript

The development of a captioning system that supports the real-time understanding of monologue speech such as lectures and commentaries is required. In monologues, since a sentence tends to be long, each sentence is often displayed in multi lines on the screen and becomes unreadable. In the case, it is necessary to insert linefeeds into a text so that the text becomes easy to read. This paper proposes a technique for inserting linefeeds into a Japanese spoken monologue sentence as an elemental technique to generate the readable captions. Our method inserts linefeeds into a sentence by applying the rules based on morphemes, dependencies and clause boundaries. We established the rules by circumstantially investigating the corpus annotated with linefeeds. An experiment using Japanese monologue corpus has shown the effectiveness of our rules.

Construction of linefeed insertion rules for lecture transcript and their evaluation

The development of a captioning system that supports the real-time understanding of monologue speech such as lectures and commentaries is required. In monologues, since a sentence tends to be long, each sentence is often displayed in multilines on the screen. In the case, it is necessary to insert linefeeds into a text so that the text becomes easy to read. This paper proposes a rule-based technique for inserting linefeeds into a Japanese spoken monologue sentence as an elemental technique to generate the readable captions. Our method inserts linefeeds into a sentence by applying the rules based on morphemes, dependencies and clause boundaries. We established the rules by circumstantially investigating the corpus annotated with linefeeds. An experiment using Japanese monologue corpus has shown the effectiveness of our rules.

Text-Style Conversion of Speech Transcript into Web Document for Lecture Archive

It is very significant to the knowledge society to accumulate spoken documents on the web. However, because of the high redundancy of spontaneous speech, the faithfully transcribed text is not readable on an Internet browser, and therefore not suitable as a web document. This paper proposes a technique for converting spoken documents into web documents for the purpose of building a speech archiving system. The technique edits automatically transcribed texts and improves their readability on the browser. The readable text can be generated by applying technology such as paraphrasing, segmentation, and structuring transcribed texts. Editing experiments using lecture data demonstrated the feasibility of the technique. A prototype system of spoken document archiving was implemented to confirm its effectiveness.

Search method for ordinances and rules in Japanese local governments based on distributed representation

This paper proposes a new search method that supports legislative duties in Japanese local governments where both expert and non-experts draft local ordinances. Since such legislation requires comparison with the ordinances of other local governments, our purpose is to introduce a neural model and show how it effectively performs similarity search tasks for ordinances. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous scheme for similarity search with a F-measure of 0.977. An additional experiment shows that our method is useful for analyzing the legislation of local governments.

Extraction of legal bilingual phrases from the Japanese Official Gazette, English Edition

ABSTRACT The Japanese government has promoted dissemination of Japanese legal information to the world, and it has released English translations of Japanese statutes as well as a Japanese-English bilingual dictionary for statutory terms. However, the number of these translations is insufficient. The bilingual dictionary, the Japanese-English Standard Legal Terms Dictionary, contains only 3782 entries. To expand this key reference work, we focused on the Japanese Official Gazette, English Edition, which was published from 1946 to 1952 under order of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. We conducted an experiment on targeted phrase extraction to acquire legal translations and confirm the usefulness of the Japanese Official Gazette, English Edition.

Japanese Word Reordering Executed Concurrently with Dependency Parsing and Its Evaluation

This paper proposes a method for reordering words in a Japanese sentence based on concurrent execution with dependency parsing so that the sentence becomes more readable. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) we extend a probablistic model used in the previous work which concurrently performs word reordering and dependency parsing; (2) we conducted an evaluation experiment using our semi-automatically constructed evaluation data so that sentences in the data are more likely to be spontaneously written by natives than the automatically constructed evaluation data in the previous work.