Disambiguating Japanese compound verbs

The purpose of this study is to disambiguate Japanese compound verbs (JCVs) using two methods: (1) a statistical sense discrimination method based on verb-combinatoric information, which feeds into a first-sense statistical sense disambiguation method and (2) a manual rule-based sense disambiguation method which draws on argument structure and verb semantics. In evaluation, we found that the rule-based method outperformed the statistical method at 94.6% token-level accuracy, suggesting that fine-grained semantic analysis is an important component of JCV disambiguation. At the same time, the performance of the fully automated statistical method was found to be surprisingly good at 82.6%, without making use of syntactic or lexical semantic knowledge.