J-UniMorph: Japanese Morphological Annotation through the Universal Feature Schema
This provides a resource for cross-linguistic research and applications in Japanese language processing, though it is incremental as it builds on the UniMorph schema.
The authors tackled the lack of comprehensive morphological annotation for Japanese by creating J-UniMorph, a dataset based on the UniMorph schema that offers 118 inflected forms per word on average, compared to 12 in the existing Wiktionary Edition.
We introduce a Japanese Morphology dataset, J-UniMorph, developed based on the UniMorph feature schema. This dataset addresses the unique and rich verb forms characteristic of the language's agglutinative nature. J-UniMorph distinguishes itself from the existing Japanese subset of UniMorph, which is automatically extracted from Wiktionary. On average, the Wiktionary Edition features around 12 inflected forms for each word and is primarily dominated by denominal verbs (i.e., [noun] +suru (do-PRS)). Morphologically, this form is equivalent to the verb suru (do). In contrast, J-UniMorph explores a much broader and more frequently used range of verb forms, offering 118 inflected forms for each word on average. It includes honorifics, a range of politeness levels, and other linguistic nuances, emphasizing the distinctive characteristics of the Japanese language. This paper presents detailed statistics and characteristics of J-UniMorph, comparing it with the Wiktionary Edition. We release J-UniMorph and its interactive visualizer publicly available, aiming to support cross-linguistic research and various applications.