Proposal of Honorific Style Transfer Task for Supporting Japanese Language Learners

Abstract

Honorific Language is considered important for smooth communication in social life in Japan, but it is difficult for non-native learners of Japanese to use hororific language properly. However, there has been little discussion about the development of a system that automatically converts ordinary language style, and there is no data to evaluate such a system. In this study, we propose a new task called honorific conversion, which automatically converts arbitrary ordinary sentences into appropriate honorific sentences while preserving the meaning. We also provided a data annotation scheme and an evaluation dataset to establish this task. Furthermore, we show the validity and feasibility of solving the salutation transformation task as a type of style transformation task by investigating the use of sentence decomposition methods.