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1 Introduction
Speakers sometimes have a range of options for word order in conveying a similar meaning. A typical case in English is dative alternation:
[1]
1A teacher gave a student a book.
1A teacher gave a book to a student.
Even for such a particular alternation, several studies Bresnan et al. (2007); Hovav and Levin (2008); Colleman (2009) investigated the factors determining this word order and found that the choice is not random. For analyzing such linguistic phenomena, linguists repeat the cycle of constructing hypotheses and testing their validity, usually through psychological experiments or count-based methods. However, these approaches sometimes face difficulties, such as scalability issues in psychological experiments and the propagation of preprocessor errors in count-based methods.
Compared to the typical approaches for evaluating linguistic hypotheses, approaches using LMs have potential advantages (Section 3.2). In this study, we examine the methodology of using LMs for analyzing word order (Figure 1
). To validate the LM-based method, we first examine if there is a parallel between canonical word order and generation probability of LMs for each word order.
Futrell and Levy (2019) reported that English LMs have human-like word order preferences, which can be one piece of evidence for validating the LM-based method. However, it is not clear whether the above assumption is valid even in languages with more flexible word order.
In this study, we specifically focus on the Japanese language due to its complex and flexible word order. There are many claims on the canonical word order of Japanese, and it has attracted considerable attention from linguists and natural language processing (NLP) researchers for decades
Hoji (1985); Saeki (1998); Miyamoto (2002); Matsuoka (2003); Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004); Nakamoto et al. (2006); Shigenaga (2014); Sasano and Okumura (2016); Orita (2017); Asahara et al. (2018).We investigated the validity of using Japanese LMs for canonical word order analysis by conducting two sets of experiments: (i) comparing word order preference in LMs to that in Japanese speakers (Section 4), and (ii) checking the consistency between the preference of LMs with previous linguistic studies (Section 5). From our experiments, we tentatively conclude that LMs display sufficient word order knowledge for usage as an analysis tool, and further explore potential applications. Finally, we analyzed the relationship between topicalization and word order of Japanese by taking advantage of the LM-based method (Section 6).
In summary, we:
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Discuss and validate the use of LMs as a tool for word order analysis as well as investigate the sensitivity of LMs against different word orders in non-European language (Section 3);
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Showcase the advantages of an LM-based method through analyzing linguistic phenomena that is difficult to explore with the previous data-driven methods (Section 6).
2 Linguistic background
This section provides a brief overview of the linguistic background of canonical word order, some basics of Japanese grammar, and common methods of linguistic analysis.
2.1 On canonical word order
Every language is assumed to have a canonical word order, even those with flexible word order Comrie (1989). There has been a significant linguistic effort to reveal the factors determining the canonical word order Bresnan et al. (2007); Hoji (1985). The motivations for revealing the canonical word order range from linguistic interests to those involved in various other fields—it relates to language acquisition and production in psycholinguistics Slobin and Bever (1982); Akhtar (1999), second language education Alonso Belmonte et al. (2000)
, and natural language generation
Visweswariah et al. (2011) or error correction Cheng et al. (2014) in NLP. In Japanese, there are also many studies on its canonical word order Hoji (1985); Saeki (1998); Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004); Sasano and Okumura (2016).Japanese canonical word order
The word order of Japanese is basically subject-object-verb (SOV) order, but there is no strict rule except placing the verb at the end of the sentence Tsujimura (2013). For example, the following three sentences have the same denotational meaning (“A teacher gave a student a book.”):
[2]
4先生が & 生徒に & 本を & あげた. teacher-NOM & student-DAT & book-ACC & gave.
4先生が & 本を & 生徒に & あげた. teacher-NOM & book-ACC & student-DAT & gave.
4本を & 生徒に & 先生が & あげた. book-ACC & student-DAT & teacher-NOM & gave.
This order-free nature suggests that the position of each constituent does not represent its semantic role (case). Instead, postpositional case particles indicate the roles. Table 1 shows typical constituents in a Japanese sentence, their postpositional particles, their canonical order, and the sections of this paper where each of them is analyzed. Note that postpositional case particles are sometimes omitted or replaced with other particles such as adverbial particles (Section 6). These characteristics complicate the factors determining word order, which renders the automatic analysis of Japanese word order difficult.
2.2 On typical methods for evaluating word order hypotheses and their difficulties
There are two main methods in linguistic research: human-based methods, which observe human reactions, and data-driven methods, which analyze text corpora.
Human-based methods
A typical approach of testing word order hypotheses is observing the reaction (e.g., reading time) of humans to each word order Shigenaga (2014); Bahlmann et al. (2007). These approaches are based on the direct observation of humans, but this method has scalability issues. There are also concerns that the participants may be biased, and that the experiments may not be replicable.
Data-driven methods
Another typical approach is counting the occurrence frequencies of the targeted phenomena in a large corpus. This count-based method is based on the assumption that there are parallels between the canonical word order and the frequency of each word order in a large corpus. The parallel has been widely discussed Arnon and Snider (2010); Bresnan et al. (2007), and many studies rely on this assumption Sasano and Okumura (2016); Kempen and Harbusch (2004). One of the advantages of this approach is suitability for large-scale experiments. This enables considering a large number of examples.
In this method, researchers often have to identify the phenomena of interest with preprocessors (e.g., the predicate-argument structure parser used by Sasano and Okumura (2016)) in order to count them. However, sometimes, identification of the targeted phenomena is difficult for the preprocessors, which limits the possibilities of analysis. For example, Sasano and Okumura (2016) focused only on simple examples where case markers appear explicitly, and only extract the head noun of the argument to avoid preprocessor errors. Thus, they could not analyze the phenomena in which the above conditions were not met. The above issue becomes more serious in low-resource languages, where the necessary preprocessors are often unavailable.
In this count-based direction, Bloem (2016)
used n-gram LMs to test the claims on the German two-verb clusters. This method is closest to our proposed approach, but the general validity of using LMs is out of focus. This LM-based method also relies on the assumption of the parallels between the canonical word order and the frequency.
Another common data-driven approach is to train an interpretable model (e.g., Bayesian linear mixed models) to predict the targeted linguistic phenomena and analyze the inner workings of the model (e.g., slope parameters)
Bresnan et al. (2007); Asahara et al. (2018). Through this approach, researchers can obtain richer statistics, such as the strength of each factor’s effect on the targeted phenomena, but creating labeled data and designing features for supervised learning can be costly.
3 LM-based method
3.1 Overview of the LM-based method
In the NLP field, LMs are widely used to estimate the acceptability of text
Olteanu et al. (2006); Kann et al. (2018). An overview of the LM-based method is shown in Figure 1. After preparing several word orders considering the targeted linguistic hypothesis, we compare their generation probabilities in LMs. We assume that the word order with the highest generation probability follows their canonical word order.3.2 Advantages of the LM-based method
In the count-based methods mentioned in Section 2.2, researchers often require preprocessors to identify the occurrence of the phenomena of interest in a large corpus. On the other hand, researchers need to prepare data to be scored by LMs to evaluate hypothesis in the LM-based method. Whether it is easier to prepare the preprocessor or the evaluation data depends on the situation. For example, the data preparation is easier in the situation where one wants to analyze the word order trends when a specific postpositional particle is omitted. The question is whether Japanese speakers prefer the word order like in Example (3)-a or (3)-b.111Omitted characters are crossed out. (e.g., を)
[3]
3生徒に & 本 を & あげた. student-DAT & book(-ACC) & gave.
3本 を & 生徒に & あげた. book(-ACC) & student-DAT & gave.
While identifying the cases (ACC in Example (3)) without their postpositional particle is difficult, creating the data without a specific postpositional particle by modifying the existing data is easier such as creating Example (4)-b from Example (4)-a.
[4]
3生徒に & 本を & あげた. student-DAT & book-ACC & gave.
3生徒に & 本 を & あげた. student-DAT & book(-ACC) & gave.
Thus, in such situation, the LM-based method can be suitable.
The human-based method is more reliable given an example. However, it can be prohibitively costly. While the human-based method requires an evaluation data and human subjects, the LM-based method only requires the evaluation data. Thus, the LM-based method can be more suitable for estimating the validity of hypotheses and considering many examples as exhaustively as possible. In addition, the LM-based method can be replicable. The suitable approach can be different in a situation, and broadening the choice of alternative methodologies may be beneficial to linguistic research.
Nowadays, various useful frameworks, language resources, and machine resources required to train LMs are available,222For example, one can train LMs with fairseq Ott et al. (2019) and Wikipedia data on cloud computing platforms. which support the ease of implementing the LM-based method. Moreover, we make the LMs used in this study available.333https://github.com/kuribayashi4/LM_as_Word_Order_Evaluator.
3.3 Strategies to validate the use of LM to analyze the word order
The goal of this study is to validate the use of LMs for analyzing the canonical word order. The canonical word order itself is still a subject of research, and the community does not know all about it. Thus, it is ultimately impossible to enumerate the requirements on what LMs should know about the canonical word order and probe the knowledge of LMs. Instead, we demonstrate the validity of the LM-based method by showcasing two types of parallels: (i) word order preference of LMs showing parallels with that of humans, and (ii) the results obtained with the LM-based method and those with previous methods being consistent on various claims on canonical word order. If the results of LMs are consistent with those of existing methods, the possibility that LMs and existing methods have the same ability to evaluate the hypotheses is supported. If the LM-based method is assumed to be valid, the method has the potential to streamline the research on unevaluated claims on word order. In the experiment sections, we examine the properties of Japanese LMs on (i) and (ii).
3.4 CAUTION – when using LMs for evaluating linguistic hypotheses
Even if LMs satisfy the criteria described in 3.3, there is no exact guarantee that LM scores will reflect the effectiveness of human processing of specific constructions in general. Thus, there seems to be a danger of confusing LM artifacts with language facts. Based on this, we hope that researchers use LMs as a tool just to limit the hypothesis space. LM supported hypotheses should then be re-verified with a human-based approach.
Furthermore, since there is a lot of hypotheses and corresponding research, we cannot check all the properties of LMs in this study. This study focuses on intra-sentential factors of Japanese case order, and it is still unclear whether the LM-based method works properly in linguistic phenomena which are far from being the focus of this study. This is the first study where evidence is collected on the validity of using LMs for word order analysis and encourages further research on collecting such evidence and examining under what conditions this validity is guaranteed.
3.5 LMs settings
We used auto-regressive, unidirectional LMs with Transformer Vaswani et al. (2017).
We used two variants of LMs, a character-based LM (CLM) and a subword-based LM (SLM).
In training SLM, the input sentences are once divided into morphemes by MeCab Kudo (2006) with a UniDic dictionary,444https://unidic.ninjal.ac.jp/ and then these morphemes are split into subword units by byte-pair-encoding. Sennrich et al. (2016)555Implemented in sentencepiece Kudo and Richardson (2018) We set character coverage to 0.9995，and vocab size to 100,000..
160M sentences66614GB in UTF-8 encoding. For reference, Japanese Wikipedia has around 2.5 GB of text. Because the focus of this study has context-independent nature, the sentences order is shuffled to prevent learning the inter-sentential characteristics of the language. randomly selected from 3B web pages were used to train the LMs.
Hyperparameters are shown in Appendix
Given a sentence , we calculate its generation probability , where and are generation probabilities calculated by a left-to-right LM and a right-to-left LM, respectively. Depending on the hypothesis, we compare the generation probabilities of various variants of with different word orders. We assume that the word order with the highest generation probability follows their canonical word order.
4 Experiment1: comparing human and LMs word order preference
To examine the validity of using LMs for canonical word order analysis, we examined the parallels between the LMs and humans on the task determining the canonicality of the word order (Figure 2). First, we created data for this task (Section 4.1). We then compared the word order preference of LMs and that of humans (Section 4.2).
4.1 Human annotation
Data
We randomly collected 10k sentences from 3B web pages, which are not overlapped with the LM training data. To remove overly complex sentences, we extracted sentences that must: (i) have less than or equal to five clauses and one verb, (ii) have clauses with a sibling relationship in its dependency tree, and they accompany a particle or adverb, (iii) not have special symbols such as parentheses, and (iv) not have a backward dependency path. For each sentence, we created its scrambled version.777When several scrambled versions were possible for a given sentence, we randomly selected one of them. The scrambling process is as follows:
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Identify the dependency structure by using JUMAN888http://nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/EN/index.php?JUMAN and KNP999http://nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/EN/index.php?KNP.
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Randomly select a clause with several children.
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Shuffle the position of its children along with their descendants.
Annotation
We used the crowdsourcing platform Yahoo Japan!101010https://crowdsourcing.yahoo.co.jp/. For our task, we showed crowdworkers a pair of sentences (order, order), where one sentence has the original word order, and the other sentence has a scrambled word order.111111Crowdworkers did not know which sentence was the original sentence. Each annotator was instructed to label the pair with one of the following choices: (1) order is better, (2) order is better, or (3) the pair contains a semantically broken sentence. Only the sentences (order, order) were shown to the annotators, and they were instructed not to imagine a specific context for the sentences. We filtered unmotivated workers by using check questions.121212We manually created check questions considering the Japanese speakers’ preference in trial experiments in advance. For each pair instance, we employed 10 crowdworkers. In total, 756 unique, motivated crowdworkers participated in our task.
From the annotated data, we collected only the pairs satisfying the following conditions for our experiments: (i) none of 10 annotators determined that the pair contains a semantically broken sentence, and (ii) nine or more annotators preferred the same order. The majority decision is labeled in each pair; the task is binary classification. We assume that if many workers prefer a certain word order, then it follows its canonical word order, and the other one deviates from it. We collected 2.6k pair instances of sentences.
4.2 Result
We compared the word order preference of LMs and that of the workers by using the 2.6K pairs created in Section 4.1. We calculated the correlation of the decisions between the LMs and the workers; which word order is more appropriate order or order. The word orders supported by CLM and SLM are highly correlated with workers, with the Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.89 and 0.90, respectively. This supports the assumption that the generation probability of LMs can determine the canonical word order as accurately as humans do. Note that such a direct comparison of word order is difficult with the count-based methods because of the sparsity of the corpus.
5 Experiment2: consistency with previous studies
This section examines whether LMs show word order preference consistent with previous linguistic studies. The results are entirely consistent, which support the validity of the LM-based methods in Japanese. Each subsection focuses on a specific component of Japanese sentences.
5.1 Double objects
The order of double objects is one of the most controversial topics in Japanese word order. Examples of the possible order are as follows:
- (5)
-
- DAT-ACC:
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生徒に student-DAT
本を
book-ACC
あげた
gave.
- ACC-DAT:
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本を book-ACC
生徒に
student-DAT
あげた
gave.
Henceforth, DAT-ACC/ACC-DAT denotes the word order in which the DAT/ACC argument precedes the ACC/DAT argument. We evaluate the claims Sasano and Okumura (2016) focused on with the data they collected.131313We filtered the examples overlapping with the training data of LMs in advance. As a result, we collected 4.5M examples.
|
|
|
Word order for each verb
First, we analyzed the trend of the double object order for each verb. We analyzed 620 verbs following Sasano and Okumura (2016).141414We removed verbs for which all examples overlap with the data for training the LMs. For each set of examples corresponding to a verb , we: (i) created an instance with the swapped order of ACC and DAT for each example, and (ii) compared the generation probabilities of the original and swapped instance. is the set of examples preferred by LMs. is calculated as follows:
where is the number of examples with the ACC-DAT/DAT-ACC order in .
Figure 3-(a) shows the relationship between determined by LMs and one reported in a previous count-based study Sasano and Okumura (2016). These results strongly correlate with the Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.91 and 0.88, in CLM and SLM, respectively. In addition, “canonical word order is DAT-ACC” Hoji (1985) is unlikely to be valid because there are verbs where is very high (details in Appendix B.1). This conclusion is consistent with Sasano and Okumura (2016).
Word order and verb types
In Japanese, there are show-type and pass-type verbs (details in Appendix B.2). Matsuoka (2003) claimed that the order of double objects differs depending on these verb types. Following Sasano and Okumura (2016), we analyzed this trends.
We applied the Wilcoxon rank-sum test between the distributions of determined by LMs in the two groups (show-type and pass-type verbs). The results show no significant difference between the two groups (p-value is 0.17 and 0.12 in the experiments using CLM and SLM, respectively). These results are consistent with the count-based Sasano and Okumura (2016) and the human-based Miyamoto (2002); Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004) methods.
Word order and argument omission
Sasano and Okumura (2016) claimed that the frequently omitted case is placed near the verb. First, we calculated for each verb as follows:
where denotes the number of examples in which the DAT/ACC case appears, and the other case does not in . A large score indicates that the DAT argument is less frequently omitted than the ACC argument in . We analyzed the relationship between and for each verb.
Figure 3-(b) shows that the regression lines from the LM-based method and Sasano and Okumura (2016) corroborate similar trends. The Pearson correlation coefficient between and is 0.404 for CLM and 0.374 for SLM. The results are consistent with Sasano and Okumura (2016), where they reported that the correlation coefficient was 0.391.
Word order and semantic role of the dative argument
Matsuoka (2003) claimed that the canonical word order differs depending on the semantic role of the dative argument. Sasano and Okumura (2016) evaluated this claim by analyzing the trend in the following two types of examples:
- (6)
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- Type-A:
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本を book-ACC
学校に
school-DAT
返した
returned.
- Type-B:
-
先生に teacher-DAT
本を
book-ACC
返した
returned.
Type-A has an inanimate goal (school) as the DAT argument, while Type-B has an animate processor (teacher). It was reported that Type-A is likely to be the ACC-DAT order, while Type-B is likely to be the DAT-ACC order. Following Sasano and Okumura (2016), we analyzed 113 verbs.151515Among the 126 verbs used in Sasano and Okumura (2016), 113 verbs with data that do not overlap with the LM training data were selected. For each verb, we compared the ACC-DAT rate in its type-A examples and the rate in its type-B examples.
The number of verbs where the ACC-DAT order is preferred in Type-A examples to Type-B examples is significantly larger (a two-sided sign test p 0.05). This result is consistent with that of Sasano and Okumura (2016); Matsuoka (2003) and implies that the LMs capture the animacy of the nouns. Details are in Appendix B.3.
Word order and co-occurrence of verb and arguments
Sasano and Okumura (2016) claimed that an argument that frequently co-occurs with the verb tends to be placed near the verb. For each example, the LMs determine which word order (DAT-ACC or ACC-DAT) is appropriate. Each example also has a score NPMI (definition in Appendix B.4). Higher NPMI means that the DAT noun in the example more strongly co-occurs with the verb in the example than the ACC noun.
Figure 3-(c) shows the relationship between NPMI and the ACC-DAT rate in each example. NPMI and the ACC-DAT rate are correlated with the Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.517 and 0.521 in CLM and SLM, respectively. These results are consistent with Sasano and Okumura (2016).
| TIMLOC | TIMNOM | LOCNOM | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CLM | .757 | .642 | .604 |
| SLM | .708 | .632 | .615 |
| Count | .686 | .666 | .681 |
5.2 Order of constituents representing time, location, and subject information
Our focus moves to the cases closer to the beginning of the sentences. The following claim is a well-known property of Japanese word order: “The case representing time information (TIM) is placed before the case representing location information (LOC), and the TIM and LOC cases are placed before the NOM case” Saeki (1960, 1998). We examined a parallel between the result obtained with the LM-based and count-based methods on this claim.
We randomly collected 81k examples from 3B web pages.161616Without overlap with the training data of LMs. To create the examples, we identified the case components by KNP, and the TIM and LOC cases were categorized with JUMAN (details in Appendix C). For each example , we created all possible word orders and obtained the word order with the highest generation probability (). Given a set of , we calculated a score for cases and as follows:
where is the number of examples where the case precedes the case in . Higher indicates that the case a is more likely to be placed before the case b. The results with the LM-based methods and the count-based method are consistent (Table 2). Both results show that is significantly larger than ( with a two-sided signed test), which indicates that the TIM case usually precedes the LOC case. Similarly, the results indicate that the TIM case and the LOC case precedes the NOM case.
5.3 Adverb position
| Model | Modal | Time | Manner | Resultive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CLM | 1. | 1 | 0.5 | 1. |
| SLM | 1. | 0.5 | 1. | 0.5 |
We checked the preference of the adverb position in LMs. The position of the adverb has no restriction except that it must be before the verb, which is similar to the trend of the case position. However, Koizumi and Tamaoka (2006) claimed that “There is a canonical position of an adverb depending on its type.” They focus on four types of adverbs: modal, time, manner, and resultive.
We used the same examples as Koizumi and Tamaoka (2006). For each example , we created its three variants with a different adverb position as follows (“A friend handled the tools roughly.”):
- (10)
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- ASOV:
-
乱暴に roughly
友達が
friend-NOM
道具を
tools-ACC
扱った
handled.
- SAOV:
-
友達が friend-NOM
乱暴に
roughly
道具を
tools-ACC
扱った
handled.
- SOAV:
-
友達が friend-NOM
道具を
tools-ACC
乱暴に
roughly
扱った
handled.
where the sequence of the alphabet such as “ASOV” denote the word order of its corresponding sentences. For example, “ASOV” indicates the order: adverb subject object verb. “A,” “S,” “O,” and “V” denote “adverb,” “subject,” “object,” and “verb,” respectively.
Then, we obtained the preferred adverb position by comparing their generation probabilities. Finally, for each adverb type and its examples, we ranked the preference of the possible adverb positions: “ASOV,” “SAOV,” and “SOAV.” Table 3 shows the rank correlation of the preference of the position of each adverb type. The results show similar trends of LMs with that of the human-based method Koizumi and Tamaoka (2006).
5.4 Long-before-short effect
| Model | long precedes short | short precedes long |
|---|---|---|
| CLM | 5,640 | 3,754 |
| SLM | 5,757 | 3,914 |
The effects of “long-before-short,” the trend that a long constituent precedes a short one, has been reported in several studies Asahara et al. (2018); Orita (2017)． We checked whether this effect can be captured with the LM-based method. Among the examples used in Section 5.2, we analyzed about 9.5k examples in which the position of the constituent with the largest number of chunks171717chunks were identified by KNP. differed between its canonical case order181818In this section, canonical case order is assumed to be TOMLOCNOMDATACC. and the order supported by LMs.
Table 4 shows that there are significantly (p 0.05 with a two-sided signed test) large numbers of examples where the longest constituent moves closer to the beginning of the sentence. This result is consistent with existing studies and supports the tendency for longer constituents to appear before shorter ones.
5.5 Summary of the results
We found parallels between the results with the LM-based method and that with the previously established method on various properties of canonical word order. These results support the use of LMs for analyzing Japanese canonical word order.
6 Analysis: word order and topicalization
In the previous section, we tentatively concluded that LMs can be used for analyzing the intra-sentential properties on the canonical word order. Based on this finding, in this section, we demonstrate the analysis of additional claims on the properties of the canonical word order with the LM-based method, which has been less explored by large-scale experiments. This section shows the analysis of the relationship between topicalization and the canonical word order. Additional analyses on the effect of various adverbial particles for the word order are shown in Appendix F.
6.1 Topicalization in Japanese
The adverbial particle “は” (TOP) is usually used as a postpositional particle when a specific constituent represents the topic or focus of the sentence Heycock (1993); Noda (1996); Fry (2003). When a case component is topicalized, the constituent moves to the beginning of the sentence, and the particle “は” (TOP) is added Noda (1996). Additionally, the original case particle is sometimes omitted,191919The particles “を” (ACC) and “が” (NOM) are omitted. which makes the case of the constituent difficult to identify. For example, to topicalize “本を” (book-ACC) in Example (8)-a, the constituent moves to the beginning of the sentence, and the original accusative case particle “を” (ACC) is omitted. Similarly, “先生が” (teacher-NOM) is topicalized in Example (8)-b. The original sentence is enclosed in the square brackets in Example (8).
[8]
4本
をは & [先生が &
本を & あげた.] book-TOP & teacher-NOM &
book-ACC & gave.
4先生
がは & [
先生が & 本を & あげた.] teacher-TOP &
teacher-NOM & book-ACC & gave.
With the above process, we can easily create a sentence with a topicalized constituent. On the other hand, identifying the original case of the topicalized case components is error-prone. Thus, the LM-based method can be suitable for empirically evaluating the claims related to the topicalization.
6.2 Experiments and results
By using the LM-based method, we evaluate the following two claims:
- (i)
-
The more anterior the case is in the canonical word order, the more likely its component is topicalized Noda (1996).
- (ii)
-
The more the verb prefers the ACC-DAT order, the more likely the ACC case is topicalized than the DAT case.
The claim (i) suggests that, for example, the NOM case is more likely to be topicalized than the ACC case because the NOM case is before the ACC case in the canonical word order of Japanese. The claim (ii) is based on our observation. It can be regarded as an extension of the claim (i) considering the effect of the verb on its argument order. We assume that the canonical word order of Japanese is TIMLOCNOMDATACC in this section.
Claim (i)
We examine which case is more likely to be topicalized. We collected 81k examples from Japanese Wikipedia (Details are in Appendix C). For each example, a set of candidates was created by topicalizing each case, as shown in Example (8). Then, we selected the sentences with the highest score by LMs in each candidate set. We denote the obtained sentences as . We calculated a score for pairs of cases and .
where is the examples where the case and appear, and case is a topic of the sentence in . The higher the score is, the more the case is likely to be topicalized than the case is.
Claim (ii)
The canonical word order of double objects is different for each verb (Section 5.1). Based on this assumption and the claim (i), we hypothesized that the more the verb prefers the ACC-DAT order, the more likely the ACC case of the verb is topicalized than the DAT case.
We used the same data as in Section 5.1. For each example, we created two sentences by topicalizing the ACC or DAT argument. Then we compared their generation probabilities. In each set of examples corresponding to a verb , we calculated the rate that the sentence with the topicalized ACC argument is preferred rather than that with the topicalized DAT argument. This rate and is significantly correlated with the Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.89 and 0.84 in CLM and SLM, respectively. This results support the claim (ii). Detailed results are shown in Appendix E.
7 Conclusion and Future work
We have proposed to use LMs as a tool for analyzing word order in Japanese. Our experimental results support the validity of using Japanese LMs for canonical word order analysis, which has the potential to broaden the possibilities of linguistic research. From an engineering view, this study supports the use of LMs for scoring Japanese word order automatically. From the viewpoint of the linguistic field, we provide additional empirical evidence to various word order hypotheses as well as demonstrate the validity of the LM-based method.
We plan to further explore the capability of LMs on other linguistic phenomena related to word order, such as “given new ordering” Nakagawa (2016); Asahara et al. (2018). Since LMs are language-agnostic, analyzing word order in another language with the LM-based method would also be an interesting direction to investigate. Furthermore, we would like to extend a comparison between machine and human language processing beyond the perspective of word order.
8 Acknowledgments
We would like to offer our gratitude to Kaori Uchiyama for taking the time to discuss our paper and Ana Brassard for her sharp feedback on English. We also would like to show our appreciation to the Tohoku NLP lab members for their valuable advice. We are particularly grateful to Ryohei Sasano for sharing the data for double objects order analyses. This work was supported by JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR1513, JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19H04162, and Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows Grant Number JP20J22697.
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Appendix A Hyperparameters and implementation of the LMs
| Fairseq model | architecture | transformer_lm |
| adaptive softmax cut off | 50,000, 140,000 | |
| Optimizer | algorithm | Nesterov accelerated gradient (nag) |
| learning rates | 1e-5 | |
| momentum | 0.99 | |
| weight decay | 0 | |
| clip norm | 0.1 | |
| Learning rate scheduler | type | cosine |
| warmup updates | 16,000 | |
| warmup init lrarning rate | 1e-7 | |
| max learning rate | 0.1 | |
| min learning rate | 1e-9 | |
| t mult (factor to grow the length of each period) | 2 | |
| learning rate period updates | 270,000 | |
| learning rate shrink | 0.75 | |
| Training | batch size | 4608 tokens |
| epochs | 3 |
We used the Transformer Vaswani et al. (2017) LMs implemented in fairseq Ott et al. (2019). Table 5 shows the hyperparameters of the LMs. The adaptive softmax cutoff Grave et al. (2017) is only applied to SLM. We split 10K sentences for dev set. The left-to-right and right-to-left CLMs achieved a perplexity of 11.05 and 11.08, respectively. The left-to-right and right-to-left SLMs achieved a perplexity of 28.51 and 28.25, respectively. Note that the difference in the perplexities between CLM and SLM is due to the difference in the vocabulary size.
Appendix B Details on Section 5.1 (double objects)
b.1 Word order for each verb
It is considered that different verbs have different preferences in the order of their object. For example, while the verb “例える” (compare) prefers the ACC-DAT order (Example (9)-a), the verb “表する” (express) prefers the DAT-ACC order (Example (9)-b).
[9]
3人間を & 色に & 例えた. person-ACC & color-DAT & compared.
( compared a person to color.)
3店主に & 敬意を & 表した. shopkeeper-DAT & respect-ACC & expressed.
( expressed a respect to a shopkeeper.)
Table 6 shows the verbs with the top five and the five worst .
| ACC-DAT is preferred | DAT-ACC is preferred | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Verb | S&O | Verb | S&O | ||
| CLM | “例える” (compare) | 0.993 | 0.945 | “表する” (to table) | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| “換算する” (converted) | 0.992 | 0.935 | “澄ます” (put on airs) | 0.000 | 0.017 | |
| “押し出す” (extruded) | 0.979 | 0.923 | “煮やす” (cook inside) | 0.000 | 0.019 | |
| “見立てる” (mitateru) | 0.994 | 0.919 | “瞑る” (close the eyes) | 0.001 | 0.021 | |
| “変換” (conversion) | 0.975 | 0.898 | “竦める” (shrug) | 0.002 | 0.022 | |
| SLM | “例える” (compare) | 0.993 | 0.926 | “喫する” (kissuru) | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| “押し出す” (extruded) | 0.979 | 0.914 | “表する” (to table) | 0.001 | 0.018 | |
| “監禁” (confinement) | 0.885 | 0.912 | “澄ます” (put on airs) | 0.000 | 0.021 | |
| “役立てる” (help) | 0.933 | 0.904 | “抜かす” (leave out) | 0.002 | 0.022 | |
| “帰す” (attributable) | 0.838 | 0.903 | “踏み入れる” (step into) | 0.002 | 0.025 | |
b.2 Word order and verb types
There are two types of causative-inchoative alternating verbs in Japanese: show-type verbs and pass-type verbs. The verb types are determined by the subject of the sentence where the corresponding inchoative verb is used. For the show-type verbs, the DAT argument of a causative sentence becomes the subject in its corresponding inchoative sentence (Example (10)). On the other hand, the ACC argument of a causative sentence becomes the subject in its corresponding inchoative sentence for the pass-type verbs (Example (11)).
- (10)
-
- Causative:
-
生徒に student-DAT
本を
book-ACC
見せた
showed.
( showed a student a book.)
- Inchoative:
-
生徒が student-NOM
見た
saw.
(A student saw .)
- (11)
-
- Causative:
-
生徒に student-DAT
本を
book-ACC
渡した
showed.
( passed a student a book.)
- Inchoative:
-
本が book-NOM
渡った
passed.
(A book passed to .)
Matsuoka (2003) claims that the show-type verb prefers the DAT-ACC order, while the pass-type verb prefers the ACC-DAT order.
Table 7 shows of the show-type and pass-type verbs. The results show no significant difference in word order trends between show-type and pass-type verbs, which are consistent with that of Sasano and Okumura (2016).
| Show-type | Pass-type | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verb | CLM | SLM | S&O | Verb | CLM | SLM | S&O | Verb | CLM | SLM | S&O |
| “知らせる” (notify) | .718 | .754 | .522 | “戻す” (put back) | .366 | .395 | .771 | “漏らす” (leak) | .152 | .207 | .332 |
| “預ける” (deposit) | .426 | .391 | .399 | “止める” (lodge) | .638 | .704 | .748 | “浮かべる” (float) | .387 | .406 | .255 |
| “見せる” (show) | .353 | .429 | .301 | “包む” (wrap) | .316 | .356 | .603 | “向ける” (direct) | .291 | .319 | .251 |
| “被せる” (cover) | .240 | .224 | .256 | “伝える” (inform) | .419 | .460 | .522 | “残す” (leave) | .323 | .318 | .238 |
| “教える” (teach) | .297 | .293 | .235 | “乗せる” (place on) | .556 | .498 | .496 | “埋める” (bury) | .405 | .430 | .223 |
| “授ける” (give) | .101 | .084 | .186 | “届ける” (deliver) | .364 | .419 | .491 | “混ぜる” (blend) | .336 | .276 | .200 |
| “浴びせる” (shower) | .113 | .121 | .177 | “並べる” (range) | .423 | .485 | .481 | “当てる” (hit) | .287 | .320 | .185 |
| “貸す” (lend) | .253 | .213 | .118 | “ぶつける” (knock) | .333 | .344 | .436 | “掛ける” (hang) | .285 | .288 | .108 |
| “着せる” (dress) | .115 | .109 | .113 | “付ける” (attach) | .326 | .329 | .368 | “重ねる” (pile) | .226 | .263 | .084 |
| - | - | - | - | “渡す” (pass) | .349 | .336 | .362 | “建てる” (build) | .117 | .099 | .069 |
| - | - | - | - | “落とす” (drop) | .379 | .397 | .351 | - | - | - | - |
| Macro Avg. | .291 | .291 | .305 | Macro Avg. | .347 | .364 | .361 | ||||
b.3 Word order and semantic role of the dative argument
As described in Section 5.1, Sasano and Okumura (2016) reported that type-A examples prefer the ACC-DAT order and type-B examples prefer the DAT-ACC order. We used the same examples as Sasano and Okumura (2016) used. We analyzed the difference in the trend of argument order between type-A and type-B examples in each verb. Table 8 shows the verbs, which show a significant change in the argument order between type-A and type-B examples (p 0.05 in a two-proportion z-test). In the experiment using CLM, 31 verbs show the trend that type-A examples more prefer the ACC-DAT order to type-B, and 17 verbs show contrary trends. In the experiment using SLM, 38 verbs show the trend that type-A examples more prefer the ACC-DAT order to type-B, and 11 verbs show contrary trends. These results show that the number of verbs, where the ACC-DAT order is preferred by type-A examples rather than type-B, is significantly larger (p 0.05 with a two-sided sign test). This experimental design follows Sasano and Okumura (2016).
| Model | Verbs whose type-A examples prefer the ACC-DAT order | Verbs whose type-B examples prefer the ACC-DAT order |
|---|---|---|
| CLM | “預ける” (deposit), “置く” (put), “持つ” (to have), “入れる” (put in), “納める” (pay), “郵送” (mailing), “供給” (supply), “出す” (put out), “運ぶ” (transport), “流す” (shed), “掛ける” (multiply), “飾る” (decorate), “広げる” (spread), “移す” (transfer), “残す” (leave), “配送” (delivery), “送る” (send), “投げる” (throw), “送付” (sending), “返却” (return), “届ける” (deliver), “戻す” (return), “着ける” (wear), “上げる” (increase), “落とす” (drop), “載せる” (load), “変更” (change), “納入” (delivery), “卸す” (sell wholesale), “掲載” (published), “通す” (through) | “配布” (distribution), “渡す” (hand over), “プレゼント” (present), “合わせる” (match), “見せる” (show), “提供” (offer), “与える” (give), “当てる” (hit), “回す” (turn), “追加” (add to), “貸す” (lend), “展示” (exhibition), “据える” (lay), “依頼” (request), “挿入” (insertion), “纏める” (collect), “請求” (claim) |
| SLM | “預ける” (deposit), “置く” (put), “頼む” (ask), “入れる” (put in), “納める” (pay), “郵送” (mailing), “出す” (put out), “運ぶ” (transport), “流す” (shed), “掛ける” (multiply), “広げる” (spread), “移す” (transfer), “残す” (leave), “リクエスト” (request), “配送” (delivery), “送る” (send), “投げる” (throw), “送付” (sending), “求める” (ask), “提出” (submission), “届ける” (deliver), “要求” (request), “戻す” (return), “寄付” (donation), “寄贈” (donation), “着ける” (wear), “乗せる” (place), “上げる” (increase), “落とす” (drop), “貼る” (stick), “分ける” (divide), “ばらまく” (spamming), “はめる” (fit), “支払う” (pay), “配達” (delivery), “卸す” (sell wholesale), “纏める” (collect), “通す” (through) | “プレゼント” (present), “持つ” (to have), “合わせる” (match), “見せる” (show), “向ける” (point), “提供” (offer), “装備” (equipment), “追加” (add to), “展示” (exhibition), “据える” (lay), “採用” (adopt) |
b.4 Word order and co-occurrence of verb and arguments
We evaluate the claim that an argument frequently co-occurring with the verb tends to be placed near the verb. We examine the relationship between each example’s word order trend and NPMI. NPMI is calculated as follows:
where, is a verb and ( DAT, ACC) is its argument.
Appendix C Data used in Section 5.2, Section 6, and Appendix F
| Case | #occurrence |
|---|---|
| TIM | 11,780 |
| LOC | 15,544 |
| NOM | 55,230 |
| DAT | 56,243 |
| ACC | 57,823 |
First, we randomly collected 50M sentences from 3B web pages. Note that there is no overlap between the collected sentences and the training data of LMs. Next, we obtained the sentences that satisfy the following criteria:
-
There is a verb (placed at the end of the sentence) with more than two arguments (accompanying the case particle ga, o, ni, or de), where dependency distance between the verb and arguments is one.
-
Each argument (with its descendant) has fewer than 11 morphemes in the argument.
In each example, the verb (satisfying the above condition), its arguments, and the descendants of the arguments are extracted. Example sentences are created by concatenating the verb, its argument, and the descendants of the arguments with preserving their order in the original sentences.
In the experiments in Section 5.2, we analyzed the word order trend of the TIM and LOC constituents. We regard the constituent (argument and its descendants) satisfying the following condition as the TIM constituent:
-
Accompanying the postpositional case particle “に” (DAT).
-
Containing time category morphemes202020identified by JUMAN.
We regard the constituent (argument and its descendants) satisfying the following condition as the LOC constituent:
-
Accompanying the postpositional case particle “で”.
-
Containing location category morphemes20.
Appendix D Details on Section 5.3 (adverb)
| Model | Modal | Time | Manner | Resultive | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canonical | Canonical | Canonical | Canonical | |||||
| CLM | ASOV | 1. | ASOV, SAOV | 1. | SAOV, SOAV | 0.5 | SAOV, SOAV | 1. |
| SLM | ASOV | 1. | SAOV | 0.5 | SAOV, SOAV | 1. | SOAV | 0.5 |
| Koizumi(2016) | ASOV | - | ASOV, SAOV | - | SAOV, SOAV | - | SAOV, SOAV | - |
Table 10 shows the correlation between the result of LMs and that of Koizumi and Tamaoka (2006). The column “Canonical” shows the position, which is significantly preferred over the other positions. “A,” “S,” “O,” and “V” denote “adverb,” “subject,” “object,” and “verb,” respectively. The sequence of the alphabets corresponds to their order; for example, “ASOV” indicates the order: adverb subject object verb. Following Koizumi and Tamaoka (2006), we examined the three candidate positions of the adverb: “ASOV,” “SAOV,” and “SOAV.” The score denotes the Pearson correlation coefficient of the preferred ranks of each adverb position to that reported in Koizumi and Tamaoka (2006).
Appendix E Details on Section 6.2 (topicalization)
|
|
| Original case particle | After the adverbial particle “は” (TOP) is added | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| が (TOP) | がは | |||
| に (TIM, DAT) | には | |||
| を (ACC) | をは | |||
| で (LOC) | では | |||
| 本 を もあげた. student-DATalso book-ACCgave. | ||||
|
生徒に student-DAT 本 をもalso book-ACC あげた. gave. |
||||
We topicalized a specific constituent by moving the constituent to the beginning of the sentence and adding the adverbial particle “は” (TOP). Strictly speaking, conjunctions are preferentially placed at the beginning of the sentence rather than topicalized constituents. The examples we used do not include the conjunctions at the beginning of the sentence. The adverbial particle was added according to the rules shown in Table E.
Claim (i): Table 11 shows the for each pair of the case (row) and (column). The results show that the more anterior the case is and the more posterior the case is in the canonical word order, the larger the is.
Claim (ii): Figure 4 shows that the more a verb prefers the ACC-DAT order, the more ACC case tends to be topicalized. The X-axis denotes the ACC-DAT rate of the verb, and the Y-axis denotes the trend that ACC is more likely to be topicalized than DAT.
Appendix F Additional analysis: adverbial particles and their effect for word order
The adverbial particles
We can add supplementary information with adverbial particles. The adverbial particle “は” (TOP) is the typical one. In Example (12), the adverbial particle “も” (also), instead of “を” (ACC), implies that there is another thing the teacher gave to the student (“a teacher gave not only but also a book to a student.”).
[(12)] 3生徒に 本 を もあげた. student-DATalso book-ACCgave.
Appendix F Additional analysis: adverbial particles and their effect for word order
The adverbial particles
We can add supplementary information with adverbial particles. The adverbial particle “は” (TOP) is the typical one. In Example (12), the adverbial particle “も” (also), instead of “を” (ACC), implies that there is another thing the teacher gave to the student (“a teacher gave not only but also a book to a student.”).
[(12)] 3生徒に 本 を もあげた. student-DATalso book-ACCgave.