System for Flexibly Judging the Misuse of Honorifics in Japanese

System for Flexibly Judging the Misuse of Honorifics in Japanese∗ Tamotsu Shirado a, Satoko Marumoto b, Masaki Murata c, and Hitoshi Isahara d aNational Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Kyoto, 619-0289 Japan shirado@nict.go.jp bThe Institute of Behavioral Sciences, Tokyo, 162-0845 Japan smarumoto@ibs.or.jp cTottori University, Tottori, 680-8550 Japan murata@ike.tottori-u.ac.jp dToyohashi University of Technology, Aichi, 441-8580 Japan isahara@tut.ac.jp Abstract. We propose a system for flexibly judging the misusage of honorifics in Japanese sentence. The system can point out misused words and phrases, and can also indicate how they are misused. The system uses judgment rules whose degrees of validity in modern Japanese society are quantified by psychological experiments. The system can judge sentences flexibly based on the learner's linguistic level by tuning thresholds regarding the degree of validity. The proposed system is expected to be applied in practical computer- aided education. Keywords: Japanese, honorifics, misuse, judgment, education ∗ This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI 21520424. 1 Introduction In Japan, linguistic honorifics play an important role in social activities, especially in conversations. There are few languages in which such linguistic honorifics are as highly developed as Japanese. One important function of linguistic honorifics is to awaken in each person a consciousness of the social-relationship among speakers, listeners, and individuals being addressed or referred to. Here, social-relationship is assumed to be represented by a combination of {relative social position among in the people in same group} and {in-group/out-group relationship} in our study. The correct usage of honorific expressions is indispensable to maintain appropriate social distance between individuals and assists smooth communication in Japanese society. Recently, however, increasing misusage of honorific expressions has been noted. One origin of such misusage may be poor education regarding linguistic honorifics. So, development of a computer-aided learning system for linguistic honorifics has been needed. Recently, Shirado (2007) proposed a system to judge the misusage of honorific expressions in Japanese. The system uses judgment rules constructed from textbooks of Japanese honorifics. However, these textbooks are not necessarily consistent with the awareness among the people regarding normative honorific expressions in modern Japanese society. Most of these textbooks 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 503–510 503 are based on traditional studies even though linguistic norms change over time. So, more practical system to learn linguistic honorifics is needed. In this paper, we propose a system to flexibly judge the misusage of honorific expressions in Japanese sentences. This system uses the framework of the system proposed by Shirado, but our system is more practical than the previous one due to the following points: 1. The judgment rules are generalized. 2. The degrees of the validity of rules are quantified. 3. Judgments are performed flexibly based on the learner's linguistic level. 2 Misusage of Japanese Honorific Expressions 2.1 Types of the Japanese Honorific Expressions Japanese honorific expressions can be divided into the following types: Sonkeigo (in Japanese) shows respect toward a person, who is usually the subject of sentence's predicate, by elevating the person's status. Sonkeigo principally includes: …

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