Japanese Computational Lexicon: A Computational Dictionary Of Japanese Verb Forms

This paper presents two main topics: a linguistic analysis of Japanese morphological lexicon focused on verb conjugation and a computational analysis of Japanese verb conjugation in Prolog programming. Prolog is one of the computer programming languages and is used to solve a problem logically with a number of statements called clauses, which are defining various relationships of the entities. With respect to the linguistic aspect, this paper discusses Japanese verb formation, its conjugation patterns, twelve basic forms of Japanese verbs, and a Japanese morphophonemic process called “音便 (onbin)” by investigating 304 regular verbs and 2 irregular verbs. Among the several different conjugation patterns defined by linguists, this paper focuses on the well-known model by non-native Japanese learners called the morphological approach. The primary goal of this research is to develop an electronic Japanese verb conjugation dictionary using Prolog programming. I apply all analyzed traits of Japanese verb conjugation to the Prolog programming to process 306 verbs to elicit 23 form variations of consonant verbs and two irregular verbs and 24 form variations of vowel verbs. This electronic Japanese verb conjugation dictionary can help non-native Japanese learners to learn fundamental Japanese verb formation and its conjugation with various forms