Categorising deverbal nouns based on lexical conceptual structure for analysing Japanese compounds

Abstract

The paper proposes a method to describe conceptual meanings of Japanese deverbal nouns for the purpose of analysing Japanese compound nouns. A lexical meaning of each constituent word is very important since it deeply influences a word formation of compound words. Therefore, we intend to use the lexical meanings of constituent words to build a Japanese compound noun analyser. As a first step to describe lexical meanings of words, we have established a simple, semantic structure based on lexical conceptual structure (we refer to the structure we establish as TLCS). After the analysing 250 deverbal nouns that appeared in technical terms, we found that the only 14 types of TLCS cover various deverbal nouns. We explain the types of TLCS and also show the procedure of assigning TLCSs to deverbals. In order to evaluate the efficacy of TLCS, we made use of the accuracy of simple compound noun analyser for analysing technical terms. The result was very good, which shows that our proposed method is very promising.