A System to Indicate Honorific Misuse in Spoken Japanese

Abstract

We developed a computational system to indicate the misuse of honorifics in word form and in performance of expressions in Japanese speech sentences. The misuse in word form was checked by constructing a list of expressions whose word form is bad in terms of honorifics. The misuse in performance was checked by constructing a consistency table. The consistency table defined the consistency between the honorific features of sentences and the social relationship among the people involved in the sentence. The social relationship was represented by combinations of [the number of people involved in the sentence] × [relative social position among the people] × [in-group/out-group relationship among the people]. The consistency table was obtained by using a machine learning technique. The proposed system was verified using test data prepared by the authors and also by third-party linguistic researchers. The results showed that the system was able to discriminate between the correct and the incorrect honorific sentences in all but a few cases. Furthermore, differences in the educational importance among the norms used in the system were revealed based on experiments using sentences written by people who are not linguistic experts.