A Japanese Word Dependency Corpus

In this paper, we present a corpus annotated with dependency relationships in Japanese. It contains about 30 thousand sentences in various domains. Six domains in Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese have part-of-speech and pronunciation annotation as well. Dictionary example sentences have pronunciation annotation and cover basic vocabulary in Japanese with English sentence equivalent. Economic newspaper articles also have pronunciation annotation and the topics are similar to those of Penn Treebank. Invention disclosures do not have other annotation, but it has a clear application, machine translation. The unit of our corpus is word like other languages contrary to existing Japanese corpora whose unit is phrase called bunsetsu. Each sentence is manually segmented into words. We first present the specification of our corpus. Then we give a detailed explanation about our standard of word dependency. We also report some preliminary results of an MST-based dependency parser on our corpus.