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Using artificial intelligence to simulate the process of learning Japanese accent rules: Toward the integration of accent into the grammar curriculum

Research Project

Project/Area Number 18K12427
Research Category

Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists

Allocation TypeMulti-year Fund
Review Section Basic Section 02090:Japanese language education-related
Research InstitutionKobe University

Principal Investigator

ALBIN Aaron  神戸大学, 国際文化学研究科, 講師 (60794526)

Project Period (FY) 2018-04-01 – 2021-03-31
Project Status Discontinued (Fiscal Year 2020)
Budget Amount *help
¥520,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥120,000)
Fiscal Year 2019: ¥260,000 (Direct Cost: ¥200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥60,000)
Fiscal Year 2018: ¥260,000 (Direct Cost: ¥200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥60,000)
Keywordscorpus / textbook / Japanese / accent / pitch / prosody / L2 / SLA / database / AI / pedagogy
Outline of Annual Research Achievements

In the previous fiscal year, we began conducting a systematic comparison of the corpus's accent annotations (two human + two machine for every sentence) and resolving any resulting disagreements through consultation with a phonetically-trained Tokyo Japanese native speaker. This undertaking finished during this fiscal year, and thus all 26,000+ entries in the database have now been hand-corrected.

While this undertaking was ongoing, extensive testing of Chamame's four types of accent rules (C, F, M, and P) proceeded in three stages. First, using the cleaned-up dataset of sentences from the dialogues in Genki, the accent rules were analyzed in terms of frequency, co-occurrence, and relationship to part-of-speech. Second, "P" rules (triggered upon prefixation) were examined in greater depth as a case study, using not only the data from the Genki corpus but also data from the appendix to Shinmeikai Japanese Accent Dictionary. Third, Unidic (the dictionary Chamame draws on for accent information) was analyzed in order to delineate the full range of possible accent rules and combinations thereof, with a carefully-selected illustrative example for each.

With the corpus finally completed and rule system thus clarified, the original plan was to run learning simulations and disseminate the results during the second half of this fiscal year. Unfortunately, due to a PI's change in affiliation to outside Japan, it was automatically required to terminate the grant. However, the research itself has continued, and with the corpus now complete, many exciting possibilities are on the horizon.

Report

(3 results)
  • 2020 Annual Research Report
  • 2019 Research-status Report
  • 2018 Research-status Report
  • Research Products

    (1 results)

All 2020

All Presentation (1 results) (of which Int'l Joint Research: 1 results)

  • [Presentation] Quantifying the pedagogical importance of Japanese accent rules: Preliminary analyses of a new accent-annotated corpus of elementary Japanese2020

    • Author(s)
      Aaron Albin, Ruilai Wang, Rie Oyama
    • Organizer
      American Association of Teachers of Japanese 2020 Annual Spring Conference
    • Related Report
      2019 Research-status Report
    • Int'l Joint Research

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Published: 2018-04-23   Modified: 2021-12-27  

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