Building a List of Synonymous Words and Phrases of Japanese Compound Verbs

Abstract

We started to construct a database of synonymous expressions of Japanese “Verb + Verb” compounds semi-automatically. Japanese is known to be rich in compound verbs consisting of two verbs joined together. However, we did not have a comprehensive Japanese compound lexicon. Recently a Japanese compound verb lexicon was constructed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics(NINJAL)(2013-15). Though it has meanings, example sentences, syntactic patterns and actual sentences from the corpus that they possess, it has no information on relationships with another words, such as synonymous words and phrases. We automatically extracted synonymous expressions of compound verbs from corpus which is “five hundred million Japanese texts gathered from the web” produced by Kawahara et.al. (2006) by using word2vec and cosine similarity and find suitable clusters which correspond to meanings of the compound verbs by using k-means++ and PCA. The automatic extraction from corpus helps humans find not only typical synonyms but also unexpected synonymous words and phrases. Then we manually compile the list of synonymous expressions of Japanese compound verbs by assessing the result and also link it to the “Compound Verb Lexicon” published by NINJAL.

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