System for Pointing Out Honorific Misusages in Japanese Speech Sentences

Abstract

In Japan, politeness plays an important role in social activities, especially in conversations. However, honorific Japanese expressions are increasingly being misused. This misusage is a failure to use the honorific expressions in a way appropriate to the relative social positions assumed in a conversation.One of the causes of this misusage may be a lack of education on honorific conversations.Because honorific expressions take a long time to learn, computer assisted language learning systems for honorific expressions should be developed.We developed a computational system to check the usages of honorific expressions in Japanese speech sentences.The system can point out misused words and phrases, and can also indicate how they have been misused.The validity of the system was tested using “correct” sentences including no misused expressions, and “incorrect” sentences including misused expressions. The system was able to point out all the misusages in the incorrect sentences.It also judged most of the correct sentences as “correct” except some cases.