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Notes
These four language families, plus the Niger-Congo family in Africa, each include more than 400 languages. Other larger language families in Asia include Austro-Asiatic (169), Tai-Kadai (76), Dravidian (73), and Altaic (66).
Bunsetsu, often translated as base phrase, is the basic unit of Japanese text proposed by Hashimoto (1984). A bunsetsu is a written and prosodic unit which is typically composed of a root and particles and can be identified by phonological principles. The concept of bunsetsu is also adopted in Korean linguistics.
Two of these languages, Filipino and Urdu, do not appear in the current issue and will be represented in the subsequent issue.
The panel, entitled Challenges in NLP: Some New Perspectives from the East, covers three different issues: Jun’ichi Tsujii’s Diversity vs. Universality: Are Asian language special, Benjamin T’sou’s Some Salient Linguistic Differences in Asia and Implications for NLP, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya’s Can the availability of detailed linguistic information (for example, morphology) help in ameliorating the scarcity of large annotated corpora.
Research on this issue was carried out in a project funded by NEDO and directed by Tokunaga Takenobu, as well as within the WG meetings of ISO TC37 SC4.
There is no clear consensus on the language family of Japanese and Korean. We follow a position popular among theoretical linguists to classify both of them in the Altaic family. Note that Ethnologue lists Japanese as a separate family, while Korean is listed as an isolate and non-affiliated language.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the authors who submitted 74 papers on a wide range of research topics on Asian languages. We had the privilege of going through all these papers and wished that the full range of resources and topics could have been presented. We would also like to thank all the reviewers, whose prompt action helped us through all the submitted papers with helpful comments. We would like to thank AFNLP for its support of the initiative to promote Asian language processing. Various colleagues helped us processing all the papers, including Dr. Sara Goggi at CNR-Italy, Dain Kaplan at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Liwu Chen at Academia Sinica. Finally, we could like to thank four people at LRE and Springer that made this special issue possible. Without the generous support of the chief editors Nancy Ide and Nicoletta Calzolari, this volume would not have been possible. In addition, without the diligent work of both Estella La Jappon and Jenna Cataluna at Springer, we would never have been able to negotiate all the steps of publication. For this introductory chapter, we would like to thank Kathleen Ahrens, Nicoletta Calzolari, and Nancy Ide for their detailed comments. We would also like to thank Aravind Joshi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Benjamin T’sou, and Jun’ichi Tsujii for making their panel materials accessible to us. Any remaining errors are, of course, ours.
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Huang, CR., Tokunaga, T. & Lee, S.Y.M. Asian language processing: current state-of-the-art. Lang Resources & Evaluation 40, 203–218 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9041-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-007-9041-9