Japanese Full-Form Lexicon

CJKI provides a Japanese Full-Form Lexicon (JFULEX) that covers roughly 120 million entries, including canonical forms, inflected forms, and compound words. This lexicon is being used by  major IT companies like Amazon and Google to enhance their search technology.

The Japanese language is agglutinative; that is, it forms words by putting together basic elements called morphemes to form countless inflected forms, compound words, and affixed words. For example, the compound 造船所 zōsenjo ‘shipyard’ consists of the free word 造船 ‘shipbuilding’ (造 ‘make; build’ + 船 ‘ship’) followed by the suffix 所 ‘place’.

Japanese also has many derived words, (morpheme + grammatical suffix) such as combining 黒 kuro ‘black’ with the suffix い i to form the adjective 黒い kuroi ‘black’. Derivation should not be confused with inflection, which consists of adding word endings to indicate grammatical functions such as tense. For example, the last syllable of the verb 帰る kaeru ‘to return’ is inflected to yield 帰れ kaere, the imperative. Japanese verbs have thousands of inflected forms.

If proper nouns, technical terms and verb-following expressions (such as なければならない nakerebanaranai) are included, the the total can exceed 120 million.