Phrase-Based Dependency Evaluation of a Japanese Parser

Extraction of predicate-argument structure is an important task that requires evaluation for many applications, yet annotated resources of predicate-argument structure are currently scarce, especially for languages other than English. This paper presents an evaluation of a Japanese parser based on dependency relations as proposed by Lin (1995, 1998), but using phrase dependency instead of word dependency. Phrase-based dependency analysis has been the preferred form of Japanese syntactic analysis, yet the use of annotated resources in this format has so far been limited to training and evaluation of dependency analyzers. We will show that (1) evaluation based on phrase-dependency is particularly well-suited for Japanese, even for an evaluation of phrase-structure grammar, and that (2) in spite of shortcomings, the proposed evaluation method has the advantage of utilizing currently available surface-based annotations in a way that is relevant to predicate-argument structure.