Sentence Complexity Estimation for Chinese-speaking Learners of Japanese

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 296–302 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Jun Liu and Yuji Matsumoto Sentence Complexity Estimation for Chinese-speaking Learners of Japanese Jun Liu Yuji Matsumoto Graduate School of Information Science Graduate School of Information Science Nara Institute of Science and Technology Nara Institute of Science and Technology 8916-5 Takayama, Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan 8916-5 Takayama, Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan liu.jun.lc3@is.naist.jp matsu@is.naist.jp Abstract It is fairly challenging for a foreign language learner to read and understand Japanese texts containing words of high difficulty level or low frequency and complicated linguistic structures. Because a large number of Chinese characters (kanji in Japanese) are commonly used both in Chinese and Japanese, the more confusing problem for Japanese language learners from kanji background countries is the acquisition of various complex Japanese functional expressions. In this study, we propose a method utilizing Japanese kanji characters, particularly Japanese–Chinese homographs with identical or similar meanings, as a critical feature of sentence- complexity estimation for Chinese- speaking learners of Japanese language. Experimental results have partially demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in enhancing the accuracy of sentence-complexity estimation. 1 Introduction Enhancing reading capability is one of the important purposes in second language teaching and learning. There are various factors that impact learners’ reading comprehension. A few of these factors involve the learners’ vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, reading strategies, interest, attitude, and motivation (Koda, 2007; Han and Song, 2011; Horiba, 2012; Gilakjani and Sabouri, 2016). Reading comprehension is also influenced by the complexity of the reading material. Texts containing highly demanding vocabularies and highly complex sentence structures are likely to disturb the learners’ reading comprehension. Learners of Japanese language from kanji background countries benefit substantially from kanji characters commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese when they read Japanese sentences or documents. However, it is more challenging for them to read and learn various Japanese functional expressions with varied meanings and usages. The selection of appropriate reading material matching the learners’ individual capabilities is highly likely to enable language learners to read in a more focused and selective manner. To support learners in gathering useful information from texts more effectively, certain online public Japanese reading-assistance systems such as Reading Tutor1, Asunaro 2 , Rikai 3 , and WWWJDIC 4 are highly effective. These systems are adequately constructed for providing an internet learning environment where learners can make complete use of information from the internet for their Japanese language study, and a few of them are specifically designed to enable language learners to understand Japanese texts by offering words with their corresponding difficulty level information or translation (Toyoda 2016). However, these systems 1 http://language.tiu.ac.jp/ 2 https://hinoki-project.org/asunaro/ 3 http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl 4 http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?9T 296 do not take the learners’ native language background into account. Moreover, these systems provide learners with limited information on the grammatical difficulty of all the various types of Japanese functional expressions, which learners actually intend to learn as a part of the procedure for learning Japanese. …

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