Abstract
To smoothen the communication between robots and humans, robots must have human-like conversational abilities. Humans converse in various ways: greetings, question-answers, suggestions, and chatting, among others. Thus, methods that extract expressions from resources such as newspaper articles and embed them into the conversation template are viewed as a way to let individuals participate in active conversations, such as chat with some information by robot. However, there is a difference in the degree of difficulty of the words used in newspaper articles and the ones used in a conversation. Words in newspaper articles are generally more difficult than those used in a conversation. Hence, it is important to convert difficult words in newspaper articles to plain expressions when using newspaper articles as a resource for a robot’s conversation, in order to avoid human discomfort. This paper suggests a method of converting difficult words to plain expressions, considering the differences in the degree of difficulty of words used in newspapers and in a conversation. The proposed method aims to convert feels natural for human by combining two approaches: a method that converts one word to another and a method that converts one word to a sentence. The results show that the proposed method converts words in newspaper articles from difficult to plain expressions with an accuracy of 75.7% and converts words while retaining their meaning with an accuracy of 81.1%. Therefore, the proposed word conversion method is found to be effective.
