J-SNACS: Adposition and Case Supersenses for Japanese Joshi

Abstract

Many languages use adpositions (prepositions or postpositions) to mark a variety of semantic relations, with different languages exhibiting both commonalities and idiosyncrasies in the relations grouped under the same lexeme. We present the first Japanese extension of the SNACS framework (Schneider et al., 2018), which has served as the basis for annotating adpositions in corpora from several languages. After establishing which of the set of particles (joshi) in Japanese qualify as case markers and adpositions as defined in SNACS, we annotate 10 chapters (≈10k tokens) of the Japanese translation of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), achieving high inter-annotator agreement. We find that, while a majority of the particles and their uses are captured by the existing and extended SNACS annotation guidelines from the previous work, some unique cases were observed. We also conduct experiments investigating the cross-lingual similarity of adposition and case marker supersenses, showing that the language-agnostic SNACS framework captures similarities not clearly observed in multilingual embedding space.