Development of a computer-assisted Japanese functional expression learning system for Chinese-speaking learners

Abstract

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed Jastudy, a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system designed specifically for Chinese-speaking learners studying Japanese functional expressions. Given a Japanese sentence as an input, the system automatically detects Japanese functional expressions using a character-based bidirectional long short-term memory with a conditional random field (BiLSTM-CRF) model. The sentence is then segmented and the parts of speech (POS) are tagged (word segmentation and POS tagging) by a Japanese morphological analyzer, MeCab ( http://taku910.github.io/mecab/ ), trained using a CRF model. In addition, the system provides JSL learners with appropriate example sentences that illustrate Japanese functional expressions. The system uses a ranking system, which gives easier sentences a higher rank, when selecting example sentences. A support vector machine for ranking (SVMRank) algorithm estimates the readability of example sentences, using Japanese-Chinese common words as an important feature. A k-means clustering algorithm is used to cluster example sentences that contain functional expressions with the same meanings, based on part-of-speech, conjugation form, and semantic attributes. Finally, to evaluate the usefulness of the system, we have conducted experiments and reported on a preliminary user study involving Chinese-speaking JSL learners.