List of Japanese NLP tools

I haven’t tried out all of these so I don’t have comments for everything, but hopefully this list will come in useful for someone.

Morphological analyzers/tokenizers

• Itadaki: a Japanese processing module for OpenOffice. I’ve done a tiny bit of work and issue documentation on a fork here, and someone forked that to work with a Japanese/German dictionary here.
• GoSen: Uses sen as a base, and is part of Itadaki; a pure Java version of ChaSen. See my previous post on where to download it from.
• MeCab: This page also contains a comparison of MeCab, ChaSen, JUMAN, and Kakasi.
• ChaSen
• JUMAN
• Cabocha: Uses support vector machines for morphological and dependency structure analysis.
• Gomoku
• Igo
• Kuromoji: Donated to Apache and used in Solr. Looks nice.

Corpora

• Hypermedia Corpus
• TüBa-J/S: Japanese treebank from university of Tübingen. Not as heavily annotated as I’d hoped. You have to send them an agreement to download it, but it’s free.
• GSK: Not free, but very cheap.
• LDC: Expensive unless your institution is a member

Other lexical resources

• Kakasi: Gives readings for kanji compounds.
• WordNet: Stil under development by NiCT. The sense numbers are cross-indexed with those in the English WordNet, so it could be useful for translation. Also, there are no verb frames like there are in English.
• LCS Database: From Okayama University
• Framenet: Unfortunately you can only do online browsing.
• Chakoshi: Online collocation search engine.