Feature extraction of English guidebooks for Hokuriku region in Japan

Abstract

Ishikawa Prefecture is located in the Hokuriku region in Japan. One of the problems of the tourism in Ishikawa is to increase the number of tourists from foreign countries. In order to solve this problem, it should be necessary to provide foreign tourists with “language service.” In this study, in order to understand a state of language service to foreign tourists, the linguistic characteristics that could be found in English guidebooks for Kanazawa, which is the capital city of Ishikawa, and Toyama, which is also in Hokuriku, were investigated, comparing with the official guidebooks for Tokyo, Fuji, Kyoto and Hida. In short, frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary was calculated to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material. As a result, it was clearly shown that English guidebooks for Hokuriku have a similar tendency to literary writings in the characteristics of character-appearance. Besides, the values of the K-characteristic for them are high, and the difficulty level, especially for Kanazawa, is low.