Japanese Word Reordering Integrated with Dependency Parsing

Although Japanese has relatively free word order, Japanese word order is not completely arbitrary and has some sort of preference. Since such preference is incompletely understood, even native Japanese writers often write Japanese sentences which are grammatically well-formed but not easy to read. This paper proposes a method for reordering words in a Japanese sentence so that the sentence becomes more readable. Our method can identify more suitable word order than conventional word reordering methods by concurrently performing dependency parsing and word reordering instead of sequentially performing the two processing steps. As the result of an experiment on word reordering using newspaper articles, we confirmed the effectiveness of our method.