Development of Easy Japanese composition support system using sentence difficulty estimation and speech synthesis

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26284069
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Japanese language education
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: Ito Akinori 東北大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 教授 (70232428)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 佐藤 和之 弘前大学, 人文学部, 教授 (40133912) ; 能勢 隆 東北大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 講師 (90550591)
• Research Collaborator: CHIBA Yuya 東北大学, 大学院工学研究科, 助教 (30780936) ; NAGANO Takeshi 東北大学, 大学院工学研究科, 産学官連携研究員
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 異文化理解・異文化コミュニケーション / やさしい日本語 / 文章作成支援 / 音声合成 / 外国語教育

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We conducted development of Easy Japanese composition support system YANSIS and related investigations. We developed a method of automatic estimation of difficulty of a sentence, and investigated relation between intelligibility of Japanese speech listened by non-Japanese-native speakers and speech rate, pause, and speech degradation by reverberation. This investigation revealed the most appropriate speech rate for Easy Japanese speech. In addition, we implemented the function of automatic sentence difficulty estimation and speech synthesizer into YANSIS.

Free Research Field

音声情報処理