Honorific Expression Learning System with Context-Sensitive Dialogue

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop an honorific expression e-learning system with dialogue so as to learn not only the wording of honorific but also the situation when we should use it. Our system consists of three phases: (1) preprocessing; (2) honorific processing; (3) dialogue processing, and three kinds of data: honorific judgment dictionary, honorific explanation dictionary and situation data. In the preprocessing phase, an input text from a user is morphologically analyzed to obtain the nouns and verbs. The honorific type that should be used in current stage is inferred from the feature of its context. In the honorific processing phase, our system extracts honorific errors in the input text and corrects based on the inferred honorific type. As the error correction, particular translation is first performed using the honorific judgment dictionary, and after that general translation is performed. The explanation for the wrong honorific is simultaneously retrieved. In the dialogue processing part, an output text corresponding to the input text is adequately provided from the situation data. Repeating the above procedures, i.e., user input, system processing, and system output, will ensure the dialogue for learning the honorific expression effectively. We evaluated the correction accuracy and learning effect of an implemented system.