Development of a System to Check Misusage of Japanese Polite Expressions

摘要

In Japan, politeness plays an important role in social activities, especially in conversations. There are few languages in which politeness is as well developed as it is in Japanese. One of the important functions of linguistic politeness is to make people aware of the relative social position (power/status) between speakers, listeners, and individuals being addressed or referred to in the group. The correct usage of polite expressions is indispensable for maintaining an appropriate social distance between individuals and facilitates smooth communication in society. Recently however, there has been an increase in the misusage of polite Japanese expressions. Misusage of polite expressions is a failure to use the polite expressions appropriate to the relative social positions assumed in a conversation. One of the origins of this misusage may be a lack of education regarding polite conversations in Japan. As it takes a long time to learn polite expressions, there is potential for the development of a computer-aided education system for polite expressions. In the present study, we developed a computational system to check for the misusage of polite expressions in the input sentences. The system can point out misused words and phrases, and can also indicate how they have been misused. There are few computational systems that can automatically point out misusage, so far.