Classification of Japanese onomatopoeias using hierarchical clustering depending on contexts

Japanese has thousands of onomatopoeias and they have recently started to attract a lot of attention of researchers on natural language processing. Some onomatopoeias are semantically or phonologically similar each other and the choice of these onomatopoeias sometimes give a big difference among Japanese sentences. In this paper, the authors classify Japanese onomatopoeias using single link hierarchical clustering depending on contexts such as surrounding words, their part-of-speeches and their meanings, and show explicitly the relationships of them from the perspective of word senses.