Abstract
This study intends to extract central conception by performing quantitative analysis on "Taiyo Corpus", which is a text corpus of highly respected magazines of modern written Japanese, in order to grasp shift in public opinions of the modern language establishment within Japan. The data consists of 10 genres for "Taiyo Corpus" (1,487 articles written in literary style and 1,741 articles written in colloquial style). Several words distinctive to each genre were extracted according to an index based on IDF measures. These distinctive words of each genre were classified into conceptual categories according to thesaurus definition of category levels. Hierarchical cluster analysis was applied to visualize the difference between literary and colloquial style. The analysis results indicate that the public concern of Japanese at the time has affected the conversion of opinion.
