Making Sense of Japanese Relative Clause Constructions
Timothy Baldwin
CSLI
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305 USA
tbaldwin@csli.stanford.edu
Abstract
We apply the C4.5 decision tree learner in interpret-
ing Japanese relative clause constructions, based
around shallow syntactic and semantic processing.
In parameterising data for use with C4.5, we pro-
pose and test various means of reducing intra-
clausal interpretational ambiguity, and cross index-
ing the overall analysis of cosubordinated relative
clause constructions. We additionally investigate
the disambiguating effect of the different parame-
ter types used, and establish upper bounds for the
task.
1 Introduction
Japanese relative clause constructions have the gen-
eral structure [[S][NP]], and constitute a noun
phrase. We will term the modifying S the “relative
clause”, the modified NP the “head NP”, and the
overall NP a “relative clause construction” or RCC.
Example RCCs are:1
(1) kin¯o
yesterday
katta
bought
b¯osi
hat
“the hat which ( ) bought yesterday”
(2) b¯osi-o
hat-ACC
katta
bought
riy¯u
reason
“the reason ( ) bought a hat”
(3) taterareta
built
yokutosi
next year
“the year after ( ) was built”
Different claims have been made as to the roles
of syntax, semantics and pragmatics (or frame se-
mantics) in the construal of Japanese RCCs (e.g.
Teramura (1975–78), Sirai and Gunji (1998), Mat-
sumoto (1997)). We consider two basic syntactico-
semantic selection processes to govern RCC con-
strual: selection of the relative clause by the head
NP and selection of the head NP by the relative
1The following abbreviations are used in glosses: NOM =
nominative, ACC = accusative, PRES = non-past and POT = po-
tential. ( ) is used to indicate zero (anaphoric) arguments.
clause. These processes can be seen to be at play
in the examples above: in (1), the head verb of the
relative clause selects for the head NP, and a di-
rect object case-slot gapping interpretation results
(i.e. b¯osi is the direct object of katta); in (2), the
head NP selects for the relative clause, resulting in
an attributive interpretation (i.e. b¯osi-o katta is an
attributive modifier of riy¯u); and in (3) an attribu-
tive interpretation similarly results, with the quali-
fication that while yokutosi selects for the relative
clause, the relative clause must in turn be able to se-
lect for a temporal modifier (e.g. stative verbs such
as soNzai-suru “exist” are incompatible with this
construction). There is a close relationship between
syntax and semantics here, in that syntax provides
the basic argument and modifier positions for the
head verb of the relative clause, which semantics
fleshes out by way of selectional restrictions. Prag-
matics also has a role to play in rating the plausibil-
ity of different interpretations (Matsumoto, 1997),
although we ignore its effects, and indeed the im-
pact of context, in this research.
Our objective in this paper is, given a taxonomy
of Japanese RCC semantic types (Baldwin, 1998)
and a gold-standard set of Japanese RCC instances,
to investigate the success of various parameter con-
figurations in interpreting RCCs. One feature of the
proposed method is that it is based on shallow anal-
ysis, centring principally around a basic case frame
and verb class description. That is, we attempt to
make maximum use of surface information in per-
forming a deep semantic task, in the same vein, e.g.,
as Joanis and Stevenson (2003) for English verb
classification and Lapata (2002) in disambiguating
nominalisations.
Relative clause interpretation is a core component
of text understanding, as demonstrated in the con-
text of the MUC conference series (Cardie, 1992;
Hobbs et al., 1997). It also has immediate appli-
cations in, e.g., Japanese–English machine transla-
tion: for case-slot gapping RCCs such as (1), we ex-
trapose the head NP from the appropriate argument
position in the English relative clause (producing,
e.g., “the hata0 [a1 a0 bought yesterday]”), and for at-
tributive RCCs such as (2), we generate the English
relative clause without extraposition and select the
relative pronoun according to the head NP (produc-
ing, e.g., “the reason that the hat was bought”).
RCC interpretation is dogged by analytical am-
biguity, in particular for phrase boundary, phrase
head/attachment and word sense ambiguity. The
first two of these concerns can be dealt with by a
parser such as KNP (Kurohashi and Nagao, 1998)
or CaboCha (Kudo and Matsumoto, 2002), or alter-
natively a tag sequence-based technique such as that
proposed by Siddharthan (2002) for English. Word
sense ambiguity is an issue if we wish to determine
the valence of the verb and make use of selectional
restrictions. We sidestep full-on verb sense disam-
biguation by associating a unique case frame with
each verb stem type and encoding common alterna-
tions in the verb class. Even here, however, we must
have some means of dealing with verb homonymy
and integrating analyses for cosubordinated relative
clauses. We investigate various techniques to re-
solve such ambiguity and combine the analysis of
multiple component clauses.
In the following, we define the RCC semantic
types (a2 2) and outline the parameters used in the
proposed method ( a2 3). We then discuss sources of
ambiguity and disambiguation methods ( a2 4), be-
fore evaluating the proposed methods ( a2 5), and fi-
nally comparing the results with those of previous
research (a2 6).
2 Definitions
We define relative clause modification as falling into
three major semantic categories, indistinguishable
orthographically: case-slot gapping, attributive and
idiomatic.
Case-slot gapping RCCs (aka “internal”/“inner
relation” (Teramura, 1975–78) or “clause host”
RCCs (Matsumoto, 1997)), are characterised by the
head NP having been gapped (or extraposed) from
a case slot subcategorised by the main verb of the
relative clause (see (1)). For our purposes, case-slot
gapping is considered to occur in 19 sub-categories,
which can be partitioned into 8 argument case
slot types (e.g. SUBJECT, DIRECT OBJECT, INDI-
RECT OBJECT) and 11 modifier case slot types
(e.g. INSTRUMENT, TEMPORAL, SOURCE LOCA-
TIVE: Baldwin (1998)). Note that the case marking
on the slot from which gapping has occurred is not
preserved either within the relative clause or on the
head NP.
Attributive RCCs (aka “external”/“outer rela-
tion” (Teramura, 1975–78) or “noun host” RCCs
(Matsumoto, 1997)) occur when the relative clause
modifies or restricts the denotatum of the head NP
(see (2)). They come in 7 varieties according to the
nature of modification (e.g. CONTENT, RESULTA-
TIVE, EXCLUSIVE).
Idiomatic RCCs are produced when the overall
RCC produces a constructionally idiomatic reading,
e.g.:
(4) mite
to see
minu
not see
huri
pretend
“looking the other way”
One feature of idiomatic RCCs is that they can be
described by a largely lexicalised construction tem-
plate, and are incompatible with conjugational al-
ternation and modifier case slots. Due to the non-
compositional nature of idiomatic RCCs, we make
no attempt to analyse them by way of the case-slot
gapping/attributive RCC dichotomy, or sub-classify
them further.
Japanese RCC interpretation as defined in this pa-
per is according to the 27 interpretation types sub-
sumed by these 3 basic categories of RCC construal.
It is important to realise that these interpretation
types are lexically indistinguishable. The semantic
type of the RCC is therefore not readily accessible
from a simple structural analysis of the RCC as con-
tained within a standard treebank.
3 Parameter description
Features used in the interpretation of RCCs include
a generalised case frame description, a verb class
characterisation, head noun semantics, morphologi-
cal analysis of the head verb, and various construc-
tional templates. These combine to form the 49-
feature parameter signature of each RCC. Unless
otherwise mentioned, all features are binary.
Case frames are applied in determining which
argument case slots are subcategorised by the head
verb of the relative clause and instantiated—hence
making them unavailable for case-slot gapping—
and conversely which case slots are subcategorised
by the head verb and uninstantiated—making them
available for case slot gapping. The range of argu-
ment case slots coincides exactly with the set of ar-
gument case-slot gapping RCC types from a2 2 (8
features in total).
Argument case slot instantiation features are set
by comparing a given case frame to the actual input,
and aligning case slots between the two according
to case marker correspondence. In the case frame
dictionary, a single generalised case frame is given
for each verb stem. Case frames were generated
from the Goi-Taikei pattern-based valency dictio-
nary (Ikehara et al., 1997) by manually merging the
major senses for each distinct verb stem. In essence,
case frames are simply a list of the argument case
slots for the verb in question in their canonical or-
dering (case frames include no modifier case slots).
Each case slot is marked for canonical case marking
and case slot type.
Case frames can contain lexicalised case slots,
which must be overtly realised for that case frame to
be triggered. Examples of fixed expressions are ki-o
tukeru (mind-ACC fix/attach) “to be careful/keep an
eye out for (something)” and yume-o miru (dream-
ACC see) “to dream”. We manually annotated each
fixed argument for “gapability”, i.e. the potential
for extraposition to the head NP position such as
with the RCC kin¯o mita yume “the dream I had last
night”. If a gapable fixed argument occurs (unmod-
ified) in head NP position, we use the “gapped fixed
argument head NP” feature to return the argument
type of gapped fixed argument (e.g. DIRECT OB-
JECT).
The unique case frame description is comple-
mented by verb classes. Verb classes are used to
describe such effects as: (1) modifier case slot com-
patibility, e.g. PROXIMAL verbs such as kaeru “re-
turn” are compatible with target locative modifier
case slots; (2) case slot interaction, e.g. INTER-
PERSONAL verbs such as au “meet” have two co-
indexed argument slots to indicate the interacting
parties; and (3) potential for valency-modifying al-
ternation, e.g. INCHOATIVE verbs such as kaisi-suru
“start” are listed with the (unaccusative) intansitive
case frame but undergo the causative-inchoative al-
ternation to produce transitive case frames (Jacob-
sen, 1992). A total of 27 verb classes are used in this
research, which incorporate a subset of the verbal
semantic attributes (VSAs) of Nakaiwa and Ikehara
(1997) as well as classes independently developed
for the purposes of this research.
Head noun semantics are used to morpho-
semantically classify the head noun (of the head
NP) into 14 classes (e.g. AGENTIVE, TEMPORAL,
FIRST-PERSON PRONOUN), based on the Goi-Taikei
noun taxonomy. Rather than attempting to disam-
biguate noun sense, the head noun semantic features
are determined as the union of all senses of the head
noun of the head NP. For coordinated head NPs,
we take the intersection of the head noun feature
vectors. One head noun semantic feature particular
to RCCs is the class of functional nouns (e.g. riy¯u
“reason”, kekka “result” and mokuteki “objective”)
which generally give rise to attributive RCCs.
In processing each unit relative clause, we
carry out morphological analysis of the head
verb of the relative clause, returning a listing
of verb morphemes and tense/aspect affixes: e.g.
the verb okonawareteita “to have been held” is
analysed as okona-ware-te-ita “to hold-PASSIVE-
PROGRESSIVE-PAST”. This has applications in case
frame transformation (e.g. passivisation), as trig-
ger conditions in constructional templates, and in
the resolution of case frame ambiguity. Case frame
transformation is carried out prior to matching case
slots between the input and case frame, producing
a description of the surface realisation of the case
frame which reflects the voice, causality, etc. of the
main verb. Case frame transformation can poten-
tially produce fan-out in the number of clause anal-
yses, particularly in the case of the (r)are verb mor-
pheme, which has passive, potential/spontaneous
and honorific readings (Jacobsen, 1992). We pro-
duce all legal case frames in this case, and leave
the selection of the correct verb interpretation for
later processing. Note that the only morphological
verb feature to make an appearance as an indepen-
dent feature is POTENTIALITY, as it combines with
nominalised adjectives to produce COMPARATIVE
RCCs such as tob-eru hirosa (jump-POT size) “(of)
size big enough to jump (in)”.
In addition to simple features, there are a number
of constructional templates, namely two features
for the attributive RCC types of EXCLUSIVE and IN-
CLUSIVE, and also one feature for idiomatic RCCs.
The constructional template for EXCLUSIVE RCCs
operates over the EXCLUDING verb class (contain-
ing nozoku “to exclude”, for example), and stipu-
lates simple past or non-past main verb conugation
and the occurrence of only an accusatively-marked
case slot within the relative clause. The satisfaction
of these constraints results in the EXCLUSIVE RCC
compatibility feature being set, as occurs for:
(5) nitiy¯obi-o
Sunday-ACC
nozo-ku
exclude-PRES
mainiti
everyday
“every day except Sundays”
Idiomatic RCC templates constrain the lexical type
and modifiability of the head NP, verbal conju-
gation, case marker alternation and modifier case
slots/adverbials. A total of 11 templates are utilised
in the current system, which are mapped onto a sin-
gle feature value.
4 Analytical ambiguity and
disambiguation
As with any NLP task, ambiguity occurs at various
levels in the data. In this section, we outline sources
of ambiguity and propose disambiguation methods
for each.
4.1 Analytical ambiguity
Analytical ambiguity arises when multiple
clause analyses exist, as a result of verb ho-
mophony/homography or fixed expression compat-
ibility.
For the purposes of our system, verb ho-
mophony occurs when multiple verb entries in the
case frame dictionary share the same kana content
(and hence pronunciation), such that a kana-based
orthography will lead to ambiguity between the dif-
ferent entries. Verb homography, on the other
hand, occurs when multiple verb entries coincide in
kanji content, leading to ambiguity for a kanji-based
orthography. Both verb homophony and homogra-
phy can be either full or partial, i.e. all forms of a
given verb pair can be homophonous/homographic,
or there can be partial overlap for particular types
of verb inflection. For example, the verbs a0a2a1a4a3
kawaru “change” anda5a6a1a7a3 kawaru “replace” are
fully homophonous, whereas a8a9a3 kiru “wear” and
a10
a3 kiru “cut” are partially homophonous (e.g., in
the simple non-past they diverge in kana orthog-
raphy, producing kita and kitta, respectively). For
verb homography, a11a9a12a2a3 tomeru “stop” and a11a13a12
a3 yameru “quit” are fully homographic, whereas
a14a16a15 okonau “carry out” anda14a16a17 iku “go” are par-
tially homographic (with overlap produced for the
simple past tense, e.g., in the form ofa14a19a18a21a20 , which
can be read as either okonatta or itta). Such over-
lap in lexical form leads to the situation of multiple
verb entries being triggered, producing independent
analyses for the RCC input.
Fixed expressions lead to analytical ambiguity
as, in most cases, the main verb of the expression
will also be compatible with productive usages, by
way of a generalised case frame entry. For example,
in addition to the fixed expression asi-o arau (foot-
ACC wash) “quit”, arau “wash” has a (unique) non-
lexicalised case frame entry, which will be compat-
ible with any lexical context satisfying the lexical
constraints on the fixed expression.
4.2 Resolving analytical ambiguity
Here, we present a cascaded system of heuristics
which resolves analytical ambiguity arising from
multiple verb entries, producing a unique feature
vector characterisation.
We select between multiple analyses for a given
relative clause in the first by preferring analyses
stemming from fixed expressions, over those con-
forming to constructional templates, in turn over
those generated through generalised techniques. We
define each such stratum as comprising a dis-
tinct expressional type, similarly to Ikehara et al.
(1996).
Expressional type is on the whole a simple but
powerful disambiguation mechanism, but is not in-
fallible. The main area in which it comes unstuck
is in giving fixed expressions absolute priority over
other analyses. Many fixed expressions can also be
interpreted compositionally: e.g. asi-o arau (foot-
ACC wash) “quit” can mean simply “wash (one’s)
feet”. In the case of asi-o arau, the case frame
is identical between the fixed and generalised ex-
pression, but the verb classes are significanly differ-
ent, potentially leading to unfortunate side-effects
when trying to interpret an RCC involving the non-
idiomatic sense of the verb.
Fixed expressions and RCCs compatible with
constructional templates tend to be relatively rare,
so in most cases, ambiguity is not resolved through
expressional type preferences. In this case, we ap-
ply a succession of heuristics of decreasing relia-
bility, until we produce a unique analysis and fea-
ture vector characterisation. These heuristics are,
in order of application: minimum verb morpheme
content, best case frame match and representational
preference.
Minimum verb morpheme content involves de-
termining the morphemic content of the head verb
of the relative clause for each verb stem it is com-
patible with, and selecting the verb stem(s) which
are morphologically least complex. Morphologi-
cal complexity is determined by simply counting
the number of morphemes, auxiliary verbs and af-
fixes in the verb composite. Given the verb com-
posite a22a4a23a24a3 mieru e.g., we would generate two
analyses: mie-ru “can see-PRES” and mi-e-ru “see-
POT-PRES”, of which we would (correctly) select
the first. In essence, this methodology picks up on
more highly stem-lexicalised verb entries, and ef-
fectively blocks more compositional verb entries.
With best case frame match, we analyse the
degree of correspondence between the case frame
listed for each dictionary entry, and the actual case
slot content of the input. In following with the shal-
low processing objective of this research, we simply
calculate the number of case slots in the input which
align with case slots in each case frame (based on
case marker overlap), and divide this by the sum of
the case slots in the case frame and in the input. We
additionally add one to the numerator to give pref-
erence to case frames of lower valency (i.e. fewer
case slots) in the case that there is no overlap with
the input. This can be formalised as:
a0a2a1a2a3a5a4a7a6a9a8a11a10a13a12a15a14a2a16a18a17 a19a21a20a23a22
a6a9a8a25a24a26 a12a15a14
a22
a22
a6a9a8
a22a27a20a28a22
a12a15a14
a22
where a29a31a30 is the set of case slots in the input, a32a34a33
the set of case slots in the current case frame, and a35a36
the case slot overlap operator. Note that the ordering
of the case slots plays no part in calculations, in an
attempt to capture the relative freedom of case slot
order in Japanese.
The final heuristic is of high recall but lesser pre-
cision, to resolve any remaining ambiguity. It is
based on the representational preference for the
current verb to take different lexical forms. The rep-
resentational preference (a37a39a38 ) of lexical form a40 of
verb entry a41 (i.e. a40a43a42 ) is defined as the likelihood of
a41 being realised as a40 :
a44a46a45 a4a48a47a50a49a51a16a52a17 a19a43a20
a42a54a53a31a55a57a56
a4a48a47a54a49a54a16
a19a21a20a59a58a61a60a63a62
a64a66a65
a42a54a53a67a55a68a56
a4 a0 a49a51a16
This is normalised over the representational pref-
erence for all source entries a40 a0 , producing the verb
score (a69a71a70 ) for each a40a43a42 :
a72a74a73 a4a48a47a50a49a51a16a52a17
a44a75a45 a4a48a47 a49 a16
a58a61a60
a44a76a45 a4a48a47
a60
a16
All frequencies are calculated based on the EDR
corpus (EDR, 1995), a 2m morpheme corpus of
largely technical Japanese prose.
In the case of a tie in representational preference,
we select one of the tied analyses randomly.
4.3 Clause cosubordination and
disambiguation
Japanese cosubordinated clauses (i.e. dependent but
not embedded clauses, as indicated by the use of a
conjunction such as nagara, te, tutu or si, or through
continuative type conjugation: Van Valin (1984))
offer an additional avenue for disambiguation:
(6) [[ Kim-ga
Kim-NOM
k¯oaN-si,
design
] seisaku-sita
produced
]
kikai
machine
“a machine designed and produced by Kim”
(7) [[ kyoneN
last year
hatumei-sare
invented
] ry¯uk¯o-sita
got popular
]
mono
thing
“things which were invented and gained popularity
last year”
As is apparent in (6) and (7), a consistent RCC
interpretation is maintained across cosubordinated
clauses, e.g. in (6), kikai “machine” is the DIRECT
OBJECT of both k¯oaN-si and seisaku-sita.2 It is pos-
sible to put this observation to use when interpreting
cosubordinated RCCs, by coordinating the feature
vectors for the unit clauses to produce a unique, co-
herent interpretation for the overall RCC. We apply
this in two ways: byOR’ing andAND’ing the feature
vectors together.
5 Evaluation
In evaluation, we compare different clausal inter-
pretation selection techniques. We further go on to
investigate the efficacy of different parameter par-
titions on disambiguation, and generate a learning
curve.
Evaluation was carried out by way of stratified
10-fold cross validation throughout, using the C4.5
decision tree learner (Quinlan, 1993).3 As C4.5 in-
duces a unique decision tree from the training data
and then applies this to the test data, we are able
to evaluate both training and test classification ac-
curacy, i.e. the relative success of the decision tree
in classifying the training data and test data, respec-
tively.
The data used in evaluation is a set of 5143
RCC instances from the EDR corpus (EDR, 1995),
of which 4.7% included cosubordinated relative
clauses (i.e. the total number of unit relative clauses
is 5408). Each RCC instance was manually anno-
tated for default interpretation independent of sen-
tential context. The 10 most-frequent interpreta-
tions (out of 27) in this test set are presented below:
Interpretation RCC supertype Freq
SUBJECT case-slot gapping .640
CONTENT attributive .135
DIRECT OBJECT case-slot gapping .074
IDIOMATIC idiomatic .024
EXCLUSIVE attributive .023
LOCATIVE case-slot gapping .022
TEMPORAL case-slot gapping .021
CO-SUBJECT case-slot gapping .012
STATIVE TOPIC case-slot gapping .010
TIME DURATIONAL case-slot gapping .009
Based on this, we can derive a baseline accuracy
of 64.0%, obtained by allocating the SUBJECT inter-
pretation to every RCC input.
2Note that in (7), the SUBJECT interpretation is shared be-
tween a passive and active clause. It is because the interpreta-
tional parallelism occurs at the grammatical relation level rather
than case-role level that we select grammatical relations for our
argument case-slot gapping types.
3We also ran TiMBL 5.0, TinySVM and Rob Malouf’s
MaxEnt toolkit over the data, but found C4.5 to produce the
best results.
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
Classification accuracy (%)
Disambiguation method
Training set
Test set
RandomUC ANDUC ORUC HeuristicUC
Figure 1: Evaluation of unit clause disambiguation
strategies
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
OR AND
Classification accuracy (%)
Method for combining clausal analyses
Training set
Test set
Upper
Bound
CI CIHeuristic*UCHeuristicUC
Figure 2: Evaluation of cosubordinated clause dis-
ambiguation strategies
5.1 Evaluation of analytical disambiguation
First, we evaluate analytical disambiguation by de-
composing each RCC into its component cosubordi-
nated RCCs and selecting most plausible interpreta-
tion for each unit clause (UC). We compare: (a) a
random selection baseline method (RandomUC); (b)
a method where all feature vectors for the unit rela-
tive clause are logically AND’ed together (ANDUC);
(c) a method where all feature vectors for the unit
clause are logically OR’ed together (ORUC); and
(d) the cascaded-heuristic method from a2 4.2 above
(HeuristicUC). The results for the various methods
are presented in Fig. 1. Note that 28.8% of clauses
occurring in the data are associated with analytical
ambiguity, and for the remainder, there is only one
verb entry in the case frame dictionary.
HeuristicUC outperforms the RandomUC baseline
to a level of statistical significance,4 in both training
and testing. ORUC lags behind HeuristicUC in testing
in particular, but is vastly superior to ANDUC, which
4All statistical significance judgements are based on the
paired a0 test (a1a3a2a5a4a7a6a4a9a8 ).
65
70
75
80
85
90
C N V C+N C+V N+V C+N+V
Classification accuracy (%)
Parameter configuration
Training set
Test set
Figure 3: Evaluation of different parameter combi-
nations (C = case slot instantiation, N = head noun
semantics, and V = head verb class)
is marginally worse than RandomUC in both training
and testing.
Based on these results, we conclude that our sys-
tem of cascaded heuristics (HeuristicUC) is the best
of the tested methods and use this as our intra-clause
disambiguation method in subsequent evaluation.
5.2 Disambiguation via cosubordination
Next, we test the cosubordination-based disam-
biguation techniques. The two core paradigms we
consider are: (1) unit clause (UC) analysis, where
each cosubordinated clause is considered indepen-
dently, as in a2 5.1; and (2) clause-integrated (CI)
analysis, where we actively use cosubordination in
disambiguation.
For unit clause analysis, we replicate the basic
HeuristicUC methodology from above and also ex-
tend it by logically AND’ing together the case slot
instantiation flags between unit clause feature vec-
tors to maintain a consistently applicable case-role
gapping analysis (Heuristica10UC).
For clause-integrated analysis, we apply
Heuristic in intra-clausal analysis, then either
logically OR or AND the component unit clause
feature vectors together, producing methods ORCI
and ANDCI, respectively.
The training and test accuracies for the described
methods over the full data set are given in Fig. 2.
Heuristica10UC (incorporating inter-clausal coordi-
nation of only case slot data) appears to offer a slight
advantage over HeuristicUC, but the two clause-
integrated analysis methods of ORCI and ANDCI are
significantly superior in both testing and training.
Overall, the best-performing method is ANDCI at a
test accuracy of 88.9%.
It is difficult to gauge the significance of the
results given that coordinating RCC’s account for
only 4.7% of the total data. One reference point
is the performance of the HeuristicUC method over
only simple (non-cosubordinated) RCCs. This gives
a training accuracy of 90.6% and test accuracy
of 89.3%, suggesting that we are actually doing
slightly worse over cosubordinated RCCs than sim-
ple RCCs, but that we gain considerably from
employing a clause-integrated approach relative to
simple unit clause analysis.
An absolute cap on performance for the original
system can be obtained through non-deterministic
evaluation, whereby the system is adjudged to be
correct in the instance that the correct analysis is
produced for any one unit clause analysis (out of
the multiple analyses per clause). This produces
an accuracy of 90.2%, which is presented as Upper
Bound in Fig. 2. Given that all that the proposed
method is doing is choosing between the different
unit clause analyses, it cannot hope to better this.
Relative to the baseline and upper bound, the error
reduction for the clause-integrated ANDCI method is
96.6%, a very strong result.
5.3 Additional evaluation
We further partitioned up the parameter space and
ran C4.5 over the different combinations thereof, us-
ing ANDCI. The particular parameter partitions we
target are case slot instantiation flags (C: 11 fea-
tures), head noun semantics (N: 14 features) and
verb classes (V: 27 features).
The system results over the individual parameter
partitions, and the various combinations of case slot
instantiation, head noun semantics and verb classes
(e.g. N+V = head noun semantics and verb classes),
are presented in Fig. 3.5
The value of head noun semantics is borne out by
the high test accuracy for N of 76.0%. We can addi-
tionally see that case slot instantiation and verb class
features provide approximately equivalent discrim-
inatory power, both well above the absolute base-
line of 64.0%. This is despite case slot instantia-
tion flags being less than half the number of verb
classes, largely due to the direct correlation between
case slot instantiation judgements and case-slot gap-
ping analyses, which account for around 80% of all
RCCs.
The affinity between case slot instantiation judge-
ments and the semantics of the head noun is evi-
denced in the strong performance of C+N, although
even here, verb classes gain us an additional 5% of
performance. Essentially what is occurring here is
that selectional preferences between particular head
noun semantics and certain case-slot/analysis types
5Note that C+N+V corresponds to the full parameter space,
and is identical to ANDCI in Figure 2.
are incrementally enhanced as we add in the ex-
tra dimensions of case slot instantiation and verb
classes. The orthogonality of the three dimensions
is demonstrated by the incremental performance
improvement as we add in extra parameter types.
This finding provides evidence for our earlier claims
about selection in RCCs being based on the com-
bination of head noun semantics, verb classes and
information about what case slots are vacant in the
relative clause.
To determine if the 90.2% upper bound on clas-
sification accuracy for the given experimental setup
is due to limitations in the particular resources we
are using or an inherent bound on the RCC inter-
pretation task as defined herein, we performed a
manual annotation task involving 4 annotators and
100 randomly-selected RCCs, taken from the 5143
RCCs used in this research. The mean agreement
between the annotators was 90.0%, coinciding re-
markably well with the 90.2% figure. This pro-
vides extra evidence for the success of the proposed
method, and suggests that there is little room for im-
provement given the current task definition.
6 Discussion
Perhaps the most directly comparable research to
that outlined in this paper is that of Abekawa et al.
(2001), who disambiguate RCCs according to sim-
plex dependency data and KL divergence. That is,
they extract out a0a2a1a4a3a6a5a7a1a9a8a11a10a13a12a15a14a17a16 a18a19a12a6a20a22a21a23a16a24a20a7a8a17a25a6a16a24a20a11a26a28a27 triples
from corpus data, and disambiguate RCCs accord-
ing to which case slot the head noun occurs in most
commonly in simplex data. The accuracy for their
method over a task where they distinguished be-
tween attributive and 6 types of case-slot gapping
RCCs (defined according to case marker) was a rel-
atively modest 65.3%. For a binary attributive vs.
case-slot gapping task, the accuracy was a more re-
spectable 88.8%, but still considerably lower than
that achieved in this research.
An alternate point of reference is found in the
work of Li et al. (1998) on Korean RCCs, which
display the same structural ambiguities as Japanese
RCCs. Li et al. (1998) attain an accuracy of 90.4%
through statistical analysis of the distribution of
verb-case filler collocates, except that they classify
relative clauses according to only 5 categories and
consider only case-slot gapping RCCs. With our
method, restricting analysis to only gapping RCCs
(still retaining a total of nineteen RCC types) pro-
duces an accuracy of 94.1% for the ANDCI system
with C4.5.
In conclusion, we have proposed a method for in-
terpreting Japanese relative clause constructions ac-
cording to surface evidence and a generalised se-
mantic representation. The method is designed to
cope with analytical ambiguity in the head verb and
head noun, and also interpretational parallelism in
cosubordinated RCCs. In evaluation using C4.5, we
showed our system to have a classification accuracy
of 89.3%, marginally below the 90% upper bound
for the described task.
We have totally ignored the effects of pragmatics
and context in this research, and in doing so, shown
that it is possible to reliably derive a default RCC
interpretation using only shallow syntactic and se-
mantic features. In future research, we are inter-
ested in exploring methods of incorporating prag-
matic and contextual features into our method, and
the impact of these factors on both human and ma-
chine RCC interpretation.
Acknowledgements
This material is based upon work supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-
0094638 and was partially conducted while the author
was an invited researcher at the NTT Communication
Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
Corporation. We would like to thank Emily Bender,
Francis Bond, Kenji Kimura, Christoph Neumann, To-
moya Noro, Satoko Shiga, Hozumi Tanaka and the vari-
ous anonymous reviewers for their valuable input on this
research.

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