Analyzer to Identify Phrases and the Functional Roles in Sentences: Its Architectural Aspects

This paper presents the architectural aspects of the phrase analyzer that attempts to recognize phrases and identify the functional roles in the sentences in formal Japanese documents. Since the object of interest is a phrase, the current system, designed in an object-oriented architecture, contains the Phrase class, and makes use of the linguistic generalization about languages with Case markers that a phrase, whether a noun phrase, a verb phrase, a postposition (or preposition) phrase or a clause phrase, can be separated into the content and the function components. Without a dictionary, and drawing on the orthographic information on the words to parse, it also contains a class that identifies the types of characters, a class representing grammar, and a class playing the role of a controller. The system has a simple and intuitive structure, externally and internally, and therefore is easy to modify and extend.