Conceptual Taxonomy Of Japanese Verbs For Understanding Natural Language And Picture Patterns

This paper presents a taxonomy of "matter concepts" or concepts of verbs that play roles of governors in understanding natural language and picture patterns. For this taxonomy we associate natural language with real world picture patterns and analyze the meanings common to them. The analysis shows that matter concepts are divided into two large classes:"simple matter concepts" and "non-simple matter concepts." Furthermore, the latter is divided into "complex concepts" and "derivative concepts." About 4,700 matter concepts used in daily Japanese were actually classified according to the analysis. As a result of the classification about 1,200 basic matter concepts which cover the concepts of real world matter at a minimum were obtained. This classification was applied to a translation of picture pattern sequences into natural language.