7 Technologies for News Services in Easy Japanese for Non-native Residents
Outline
Many foreigners living in Japan are capable of everyday conversation but find it difficult to understand the content of Japanese news broadcasts. For such people, we are conducting research aimed at providing news in the form of text that has been rewritten into easy Japanese. Here, we present the support systems for this service, including a rewriting editor application.


Features

Supports collaborative work by a rewriter and an editor
To produce news items in easy Japanese, difficult words and grammatical structures in the news item are first rewritten into simpler forms by a rewriter * 1. Next, an editor * 2 makes the overall news item more concise and corrects any errors. By repeating these tasks, the editor and rewriter can produce a complete news bulletin in easy Japanese. In the rewriting editor application, these two individuals can work together one sentence at a time while writing notes to each other to settle any questions.

Identifying difficult words and phrases
The rewriting editor application includes a function that points out difficult words in news items. It also has a function for displaying the overall readability index of news items. The primary rewriter and editor rely on this index to rewrite news items into a form that is easier to read.

Searching through previous rewriting examples
The original news and rewritten news are accumulated as paired texts in an example database. When rewriting a new item, the database is searched for similar expressions so that previous rewriting examples can be used for reference.
In the works
To enable more efficient rewriting, we will work on the development of various supporting technologies.
Rewriting support system
* 1 Rewriter : Someone with an understanding of easy Japanese, e.g., a Japanese language teacher
* 2 Editor : A specialist in editing news manuscripts, such as a reporter or news desk staff

2012/5/24 (Thu) - 27 (Sun)
Exhibition