Sentence suggestion of Japanese functional expressions for Chinese-speaking learners

Abstract

We present a computer-assisted learning system, Jastudy1, which is particularly designed for Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) to learn Japanese functional expressions with suggestion of appropriate example sentences. The system automatically recognizes Japanese functional expressions using a free Japanese morphological analyzer MeCab, which is retrained on a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model. In order to select appropriate example sentences, we apply Support Vector Machines for Ranking (SVMrank) to estimate the complexity of the example sentences using Japanese-Chinese homographs as an important feature. In addition, we cluster the example sentences that contain Japanese functional expressions to discriminate different meanings and usages, based on partof- speech, conjugation forms and semantic attributes, using the k-means clustering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.