English Homepage of Kow KURODA
Grossly Simplified for Visitors Preferring English-readability.


If you prefer reading in Japanese, visit his Japanese page.

Who's Kow KURODA?

He is working at the National Institute of Communications and Information Technology (NICT), Japan as an Expert Researcher. You can email him at: k*u*r*o*d*a a*t *n*i*c*t* d*o*t g*o d*o*t j*p (removing stars between characters and turning the second, fourth and sixth words into special characters makes his real address).

What is Kow (mostly) interested in?

He is doing research in Linguistics, both theoretically and empirically (mainly in corpus-based fashion) with linguists like Jae-Ho LEE, and research in the Cognitive Science of Language (especially Cognitive Science of (Linguistic) Meaning), with a cognitive psychologist Keiko NAKAMOTO. His is interested in (anti-autonomous) syntax, (anti-autonomous) morphology, (anti-autonomous) semantics and (anti-autonomous) pragmatics, but less interested in phonology and phonetics.

What is Kow (mainly) doing?

He is currently developing a framework of semantic analysis/annotation called FOCAL (Frame-Oriented Concept Analysis of Language) inspired by the Berkeley FrameNet approach to semantic annotation. FOCAL is the basis for the annoation scheme called MSFA (Multilayered/dimensional Semantic Frame Analysis).

Currently, my collegues and I are maintaiting two web sites that host MSFA-based semantic annotations, i.e., FOCAL Hiki 1 and FOCAL Hiki 2 (protected), set up by courtesy of Masao UTIYAMA. FOCAL Hiki 1 hosts annotations on copyright-free texts like Aesop's Fables. FOCAL Hiki 2 hosts annotations on copyright-protected Japanese newspaper articles (63 sentences from 3 articles) aligned with English ones.


Kow's Selected Works and Publications in English

He wrote a lot of stuff in Japanese in a variety of areas, but not so much in English (So, it would be kind of unfortunate if you can't read in Japanese). Here are selected files and manuscripts that he wrote in English:
    Conference Papers

  1. Kow Kuroda (2010). Arguments for Parallel Distributed Parsing: Towards the Integration of lexical and sublexical (semantic) parsing [PDF]. In Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, November 4-7, 2010, Tohoku University
    -- Comments from reviewers.
  2. Kow Kuroda, Francis Bond and Kentaro Torisawa (2010). Why Wikipedia needs to make friends with WordNet. In Proceedings of The 5th International Conference of the Global WordNet Assocation (GWC-2010), 1/31-2/4/2010, Mumbai, India.
    -- Comments from reviewers.
    -- Keynote slides [PDF] used in the presentation.
  3. Kow Kuroda (2009). Pattern lattice as a model of linguistic knowledge and performance [PDF]. In Proceedings of The 23rd Pacifi Asia Conference on Information, Computation and Language, 12/03-05, City University of Hong Kong.
    -- Comments from reviewers
    -- Keynote slides [PDF] used in the talk
  4. Kow Kuroda, Masaki Murata, and Kentaro Torisawa (2009). When nouns need co-arguments: A case study of semantically unsaturated nouns. [PDF] In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon, Sept 17-19, 2009, Pisa, Italy, pp. 193-200.
    -- Comments from reviewers
  5. Kow Kuroda, Keiko Nakamoto, Yoshikata Shibuya, and Hitoshi Isahara (2007). Toward a more textual, as opposed to conceptual, approach to metaphor research. [PDF]. In Proceedings of The 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2007), Nashville.
  6. Kow Kuroda, Keiko Nakamoto, and Hitoshi Isahara (2007). When nounce words behave like real words: A study of the Japanese verb osow(arer)u [PDF]. In Proceedings of The 4th International Workshop on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon, May 10-11, Paris.
    -- The poster used in the presentation [PDF].
  7. Kow Kuroda, Keiko Nakamoto, and Hitoshi Isahara (2006). Remarks on relational nouns and relational categories [PDF]. In Conference Handbook of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society (JCSS), pp. 54-59.
    -- The revised version is available as [PDF].
  8. Kow Kuroda, Masao Utiyama, and Hitoshi Isahara (2006). Getting deeper semantics than Berkeley FrameNet using MSFA [PDF]. Proceedings of the LREC 2006, P26-EW.
    -- A revised and enlarged version is available as [PDF].
  9. Kow Kuroda and Hitoshi Isahara (2005b). “ID Tracking model” replaces “billiard ball model” of conceptualization. Presented at The 9th International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics (ICLA 2005), Seoul, Korea.
    --The abstract, revised, is [PDF].
  10. K. Kuroda and H. Isahara (2005a). Proposing the Multilayered Semantic Frame Analysis of Text: As an Effective Framework to Reveal What You Need to Know Before Defining Entries for a (Generative) Lexicon [PDF]. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop of Generative Approaches to the Lexicon, Genova, pp. 124-133.
    -- A revised and enlarged version is available as [PDF].
  11. Kow Kuroda (1999). Where do constructional meanings come from?: They come from nowhere if constructions are mere form-meaning pairs. [PDF] In Papers in Linguistic Science, Vol. 3, pp. 17-44, Department of Basic Science, Kyoto Universtiy, Japan.


  12. Slides used for Talk

  13. MSFA-based Annotation of Texts for Semantic Information [PDF]
    -- Slides used in a personal presentation for Patrick Pantel who was invited to give a talk at NLC 10/05/2007 (This presentation was done to entertain Pat. Pantel, who doesn't understand Japanese, during his kill time when other 4 talks in Japanese were in performed in the conference. They took place after his talk).
  14. Some Thoughts on the Vehicle of Concepts [PDF].
    -- Keynote slides for my oral presentation at Workshop on Ontology, Natural Language and Communication 2007, Sapporo, 1/31/2007, with invited speakers Nicoletta Calzolari (National Institute of Computational Linguistics, Italy) and Christiane Fellbam (Princeton University).
  15. Developing a Japanese Corpus Annotated for Frames and their Elements [PDF].
    -- This is the Keynote slides used at my presentation for Chuck Fillmore and Mike Ellsworth.
  16. Situations are Attractors of Semantic Interpretations [PDF]. Keynote slides used at Corpus-based Approaches to Noncompositional Phenomena, a workshop at Deutsch Gesellschaft fur Sprachwissenshaft (DGfS), 2006, Bielefeld.
    -- The abstract of this presentation is also available as Kow Kuroda, Keiko Nakamoto, Hajime Nozawa and Hitoshi Isahara (2006), Situations are Attractors of Semantic Interpretation: A way to make the FrameNet framweork more cognitively realistic [PDF].


  17. Unpublished

  18. Kow Kuroda and Hitoshi Isahara (ms), Introducing Pattern Matching Analysis (PMA) as a Friend, if not a Variant, of Construction Grammar [PDF].
    -- This is a paper applied for the presentation at The 4th International Conference on Construction Grammar, but it was unfortunately rejected.
    -- Revised and enlarged version is available as [PDF].
    -- Note that this is a companion paper to K. Nakamoto, J.-H. Lee, and K. Kuroda (2006), Constructional meanings affect preferred orders of Japanese sentences: Psycholinguistic experiments on caused motion and caused possesssion constructions [PDF]. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG4), Sep. 1-3, 2006, Univerity of Tokyo, pp. 227-228.
  19. Kow Kuroda (ms). Introducing the JCASR Project at NICT [PDF].
    --This is a document that illustrates the Japanese Corpus Annotated for Semantic Roles (JCASR) project at NICT.
  20. Kow Kuroda (2000). Foundations of Pattern Matching Analysis, A New Method Proposed for the Cognitively Realistic Description of Natural Language Syntax. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Human and Environmetal Studies, Kyoto University, Kyoto.
    -- Chapters available as:
    1. Preface
    2. Chapter 1: Introduction
    3. Chapter 2: Pattern Matching Analysis in a Nutshell
    4. Chapter 3: Conceptual Foundations of Pattern Matching Analysis
    5. Chapter 4: Pattern Macthing Analysis in Relation to Semantic Description
    6. Chapter 5: Pattern Macthing Analysis Meets English Syntax
    7. Chapter 6: What Structures Are Underlying Structures
    8. Chapter 7: Conclusion
    9. Appendix A: Composition and Decomposition of Patterns
    10. Appendix B: Discoverying Words in Contexts
    11. References

Co-authored

    Conference Papers

  1. Yoichiro Hasebe and Kow Kuroda (2009). Extraction of English ditransitive constructions using Formal Concept Analysis. [PDF] In Proceedings of The 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Information, Computation and Language, 12/03-05, City University of Hong Kong.
    -- Poster used [PDF].
  2. Keiko Nakamoto and Kow Kuroda (2008). Representing selectional restrictions in terms of semantic frames equated with situational schemas: A case study of the Japanese verb osou. In T. Ogura, et al. (eds.), Studies in Language Science Volume 7, 265-282. Hitsuji Publishing, Tokyo.
  3. Keiko Nakamoto, Jae-Ho Lee, and Kow Kuroda (2006). Constructional meanings affect preferred orders of Japanese sentences: Psycholinguistic experiments on caused motion and caused possesssion constructions [PDF]. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG4), Sep. 1-3, 2006, Univerity of Tokyo, pp. 227-228.
  4. Toshiyuki Kanamaru, Masaki Murata, Kow Kuroda, and Hitoshi Isahara (2005). Obtaining Japanese lexical units for semantic frames from Berkeley FrameNet using a bilingual corpus [PDF]. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Linguistically Interpreted Corpora (LINC-2005), Jeju Island, Republic of Korea, pp. 11-20.
  5. Yoshikata Shibuya, Kow Kuroda, Jae-Ho Lee, and Hitoshi Isahara (2006). Specifying deeper semantics of a text with MSFA [PDF]. In Techical Reports of IEICE, Vol.106, No.299, pp. 27-32.