Japanese-English Paraphrase Corpus

This paper introduces an attempt at collecting a corpus of various usages of Japanese predicates and synonymous expressions in English. We have learned that an effective consideration to exhaustively collect such various usages is to continue to create new sentences until no more sentences can be conceived within one language. We have found that an effective way of collecting synonymous expressions of predicates in JapaneseEnglish or English-Japanese translation, is to create translations of the synonymous expressions and expand them to example sets of multiple pairs. An example of the corpus is given below: J0 Kare-no kikaku-ga atatta. his plan hit “his plan was a success” J1 Kare-no kikaku-ga sêkô-shita. his plan succeeded “his plan succeeded” E0 His plan was a success. E1 His plan succeded. E2 His plan was successful. Here, the two Japanese sentences and three English sentences have basically the same meaning, and give rise to a bilingual corpus of six pairs (J0-E0, J0E1, J0-E2, J1-E0, J1-E1, J1-E2). The sentences can also be used as examples of mono-lingual paraphrases. Sentence creation becomes problematic when sentences that are collected are arbitrary. However, we can reduce the possibility of collecting only arbitrary sentences by writing down all of the sentences that one can think of, or by having multiple checkers mutually perform a check. In other words, we can have the same objectivity as elicitation experiments carried out in linguistics. We have created example sets of multiple pairs (28,000 Japanese sentences and 27,000 English sentences) for 6,000 Japanese predicates. At present, we are working to expand the sets in order to cover the main predicates of the Japanese language.