Constructing an Ontology of Japanese Lexical Properties: Specifying its Property Structures and Lexical Entries

Abstract

Regarding the construction of an ontology of Japanese lexical properties (JLP-O) as fundamental in terms of establishing a conceptual framework to guide and facilitate the construction of a large-scale lexical resource (LR) database of the Japanese lexicon, this paper primarily focuses on two major concerns for the construction of the JLP-O. The first is to map out and appropriately structure the numerous lexical and psycholinguistic properties, or variables, associated with the Japanese lexicon. The second concern is to specify an appropriate range of lexical entries classes within the JLP-O. Both concerns have far-reaching implications for effectively capturing the rich patterns of interconnections among lexical entries and lexical properties and thus for realizing a multifunctional LR. After discussing the solutions integrated into the current Resource Description Framework (RDF) representation of the JLP-O, the paper also briefly describes the extraction of a corpus-based lexicon from the recently released Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ; Maekawa et al., 2013), an authoritative sampling of the contemporary Japanese lexicon. Categorized according to the JLP-O’s range of lexical entry classes, and supplemented with orthographic variant and decomposition information, the BCCWJ-based lexicon represents a key reference LR for constructing the large-scale LR.