Construction of a Working Japanese Grammar on Computers

by HASHIMOTO Chikara

There are two kinds of linguistics that seek models of we compute a language: Theoretical linguistics and Natural Language Processing. The former should be considered a scientific study, whereas the latter is an engineering problem or practice. Reflecting their characteristics, theoretical linguistics is not strictly speaking formalized nor does it have comprehensive coverage, which any system of liguistic computation is expected to have, and NLP fails to generalize to new phenomena like a linguistic theory. We are developping an HPSG-based Japanese grammar that is executable as a computer program as well as capable of expressing linguistic generalizations, so that it would constitute an interface between theoretical linguistics and NLP. We have currently implemented a grammar that is able to deal moderately well with basic phenomena, with some principles assumed within HPSG explicitly expressed. In this paper, we report on the details of this grammar and discuss its influence of it on theoretical linguistics and NLP.