Analysis of structural characteristics of Japanese and English sentences based on Dependency Grammar and Graph theory

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370500
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Mejiro University
• Principal Investigator: OYA Masanori 目白大学, 外国語学部, 准教授 (60318748)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 日英対訳コーパス / グラフ理論 / グラフ中心性 / 構造的不一致

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In 2014, I have obtained the parse output (dependency trees) of the Japanese sentences and their English translations in a English-Japanese parallel corpus, and compared the graph centrality of these dependency trees. It has been shown as numerical data that English sentences tend to contain more embedded syntactic structure than their Japanese translations.
In 2015, I have applied the notion of structural divergence between the dependency trees of English sentences and those of their Japanese counterparts. I focused on the Japanese noun phrases with the case particle "-ga" which have been found in the same English-Japanese parallel corpus, and on how they are translated in their English counterparts. The divergence pattern have been categorized according to the notion of structural divergence.
In 2016, the frequent dependency types are found to be different between English texts written by Japanese learners of English and those written by native speakers of English.

Free Research Field

コーパス言語学、依存文法