Classification of Phonological Changes Reflected in Text: Toward a Characterization of Written Utterances

Abstract

Phonological changes reflected in text can be powerful in characterizing utterances of dialogue agents or characters’ lines in narratives. To use phonological changes to automatically characterize utterances, (i) we collected phonologically changed expressions from characters’ written utterances and (ii) formalized the knowledge required to generate phonologically changed expressions. In particular, we categorized the expressions into 137 patterns by analyzing them from the points of the phenomena concerned and the environments of the occurrences. We experimentally confirmed that the patterns cover more than 80% of the phonologically changed expressions used in novels and comics. Furthermore, (iii) to investigate whether phonological change patterns can be effective in characterization, we conducted an experiment that estimated speakers (characters) of the utterances and confirmed that the information on phonological changes improved the performance of speaker estimation for several characters.