Overview

The Jacy grammar is a broad-coverage linguistically precise grammar of Japanese. It is based on the HPSG formalism with MRS semantics. LKB is the primary grammar development environment, but the grammar processing can be efficiently done with PET.

There is an Online Demo (select “Jacy (UW)” for the grammar; it assumes that the input is tokenized).

The first application of the Japanese HPSG was the Verbmobil system, a spoken language machine translation project, where the Japanese HPSG was used in deep processing of appointment scheduling and travel reservation dialogues. The grammar was also used in an industrial application of automatic email response. It was then used in the EU project DeepThought, where the main focus is on building applications for combined shallow and deep natural language processing. This project is multilingually oriented, such that much effort is put on multilingual approaches to grammatical phenomena and building a matrix grammar that can be used as the basis for the development of further grammars. After that, it has been used in research on parse ranking with lexical semantics and machine translation.

Current development is mainly being done by FrancisBond (NTU), with help from Takayuki Kuribayashi.

Melanie Siegel (Hochschule Darmstadt) is the original principal JACY developer. Major contributions came from EmilyBender (University of Washington), especially concerning the MRS construction and numeral expressions. StephanOepen (Universitetet i Oslo & CSLI Stanford) contributed support on the grammar development environment, Japanese font encodings and inclusion of ChaSen. Ulrich Callmeier (acrolinx GmbH) contributed the requirements for letting the grammar run on his fast and efficient PET system. Akira Ohtani, ChikaraHashimoto, FrancisBond, SanaeFujita, Shigeko Nariyama and Takaaki Tanaka (NTT Communication Science Laboratories - Machine Translation Research Group) contributed grammar extensions, especially for verbal compounds and relative sentence constructions, and many lexicon entries. UlrichSchaefer integrated ChaSen, Japanese Named Entity Recognition via SProUT and PET with the Jacy grammar into the Heart of Gold middleware for robust parsing of Japanese text, adding automatic translations of Chasen’s EUC-JP byte offsets to Unicode character counts. Woodley Packard has helped with making things work with ACE. GlennSlayden tested with AGREE. Michael Goodman helped move to github and many enhancements.

Download and Licensing

The grammar sources are available at https://github.com/delph-in/jacy.

Use

git clone https://github.com/delph-in/jacy.git

This checks out the current stable version (trunk) to the local directory jacy.

JACY is licensed under the MIT license.

Copyright (c) 1997-2006 Melanie Siegel, Emily Bender, Stephan Oepen; Copyright (c) 2007- Francis Bond, Chikara Hashimoto

Maintainer: Francis Bond <bond@ieee.org>

The MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. <hr>

It would be nice if you’d give me a short feedback about the usage of the grammar. I could also offer to write email, when there is a new version available.

References

Siegel, Melanie, Bender, Emily M. and Francis Bond (2016). Jacy: An Implemented Grammar of Japanese. CLSI Studies in Computational Linguistics. CSLI Publications, Stanford University. (Canonical Citation)

Siegel, Melanie (2006): JACY - A Grammar for Annotating Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Written and Spoken Japanese for NLP Application Purposes. Habilitation thesis.

Siegel, Melanie and Emily M. Bender (2002): Efficient Deep Processing of Japanese. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Asian Language Resources and International Standardization. Coling 2002 Post-Conference Workshop. Taipei, Taiwan. (.bib)

Oepen, Stephan, Emily M. Bender, Uli Callmeier, Dan Flickinger and Melanie Siegel (2002): Parallel Distributed Grammar Engineering for Practical Applications. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation. Coling 2002 Post-Conference Workshop. Taipei, Taiwan.

Bender, Emily M. (2002): Number Names in Japanese: A Head-Medial Construction in a Head-Final Language. Linguistic Society of America.

Kiefer, B., H.-U. Krieger and M. Siegel (2000): An HPSG-to-CFG Approximation of Japanese. In Proceedings of Coling 2000, Saarbrücken.

Siegel, Melanie (2000): HPSG Analysis of Japanese. In:W.Wahlster(ed.): Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation., Springer Verlag.

Siegel, Melanie (2000): Japanese Honorification in an HPSG Framework. In Proceedings of the 14th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, ed. A. Ikeya and M. Kawamori, 289-300. Waseda University International Conference Center, Tokyo. Logico-Linguistic Society of Japan.

Siegel, Melanie (1999): The Syntactic Processing of Particles in Japanese Spoken Language. In: Wang, Jhing-Fa and Wu, Chung-Hsien (eds.): Proceedings of the 13th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Taipei 1999.

Siegel, Melanie (1998): Japanese Particles in an HPSG Grammar. Verbmobil-Report 220. Universität des Saarlandes.

Last update: 2021-06-03 by Olga Zamaraeva [edit]