Survey of Conversational Behavior: Towards the Design of a Balanced Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation

Survey of Conversational Behavior: Towards the Design of a Balanced Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation Hanae Koiso† Tomoyuki Tsuchiya‡ Ryoko Watanabe† Daisuke Yokomori‡ Masao Aizawa† Yasuharu Den§† †National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan ‡Faculty of Languages and Cultures, Kyushu University, Japan §Faculty of Letters, Chiba University, Japan Abstract In 2016, we set about building a large-scale corpus of everyday Japanese conversation—a collection of conversations embedded in naturally occurring activities in daily life. We will collect more than 200 hours of recordings over six years, publishing the corpus in 2022. To construct such a huge corpus, we have conducted a pilot project, one of whose purposes is to establish a corpus design for collecting various kinds of everyday conversations in a balanced manner. For this purpose, we conducted a survey of everyday conversational behavior, with about 250 adults, in order to reveal how diverse our everyday conversational behavior is and to build an empirical foundation for corpus design. The questionnaire included when, where, how long, with whom, and in what kind of activity informants were engaged in conversations. We found that ordinary conversations show the following tendencies: i) they mainly consist of chats, business talks, and consultations; ii) in general, the number of participants is small and the duration of the conversation is short; iii) many conversations are conducted in private places such as homes, as well as in public places such as offices and schools; and iv) some questionnaire items are related to each other. This paper describes an overview of this survey study, and then discusses how to design a large-scale corpus of everyday Japanese conversation on this basis. Keywords: corpus of everyday Japanese conversation, corpus design, survey of everyday conversational behavior 1. Introduction Since everyday conversation is a foundation of our social life, it is important to describe the characteristics of conver- sational language and clarify the mechanisms of conversa- tional interaction. In order to capture the diversity of ev- eryday conversations and to observe natural conversational behavior in our daily life, we require corpora containing various kinds of everyday conversations. Although several corpora of Japanese conversations have been developed, most of them are biased towards conversations among friends or families on the telephone or in artificially created settings, and there has been no corpus that covers a diversity of everyday conversations (see Table 1). Considering this situation, in 2016, we set about building a large-scale corpus of everyday Japanese conversation in a balanced manner. To construct such a huge corpus, we have conducted a pilot project, whose purposes are i) to establish a corpus design for collecting various kinds of everyday conversations in a balanced manner, ii) to develop a methodology for recording naturally occurring conversations, and iii) to create a transcription system suitable for precisely and efficiently transcribing natural conversations. As for the first issue, we conducted a survey of everyday conversational behavior, with about 250 Japanese adults, last year in order to reveal how diverse our everyday conversational behavior is and to to …

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