Paraphrasing of Japanese light-verb constructions based on lexical conceptual structure

Some particular classes of lexical paraphrases such as verb alteration and compound noun decomposi-tion can be handled by a handful of general rules and lexical semantic knowledge. In this paper, we attempt to capture the regularity underlying these classes of paraphrases, focusing on the paraphras-ing of Japanese light-verb constructions (LVCs). We propose a paraphrasing model for LVCs that is based on transforming the Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCSs) of verbal elements. We also pro-pose a refinement of an existing LCS dictionary. Ex-perimental results show that our LCS-based para-phrasing model characterizes some of the semantic features of those verbs required for generating para-phrases, such as the direction of an action and the relationship between arguments and surface cases.