A Morpho-Syntactic Analyzer of Controlled Japanese

The proposed morpho-syntactic analyzer parses controlled Japanese texts such as articles in newspapers, technical magazines and professional journals and public documents that are transcribed wherever applicable by using Joyo Kanji (frequently used Chinese characters). The analyzer parses sentences in controlled Japanese texts into morpho-syntactic units, further dividing them into the content and the functional parts, and assigning a functional role or roles to each unit in the sentences. As the system is not equipped with a dictionary, the parsing algorithm is based on the orthographic characteristics of words and morphemes, and the role assignment to each unit is based on the functional elements located at the end of the unit, which is a feature of a Head-final language like Japanese. The system is a light-weight rule-based morpho-syntactic analyzer that could be a useful tool for natural language processing. As the system identifies syntactic units rather than individual morphemes, together with the functional and/or syntactic roles of the units, it would help a computational system understand the syntactic and functional structures of sentences, and eventually interpret the semantics of the sentences.