Lowering Linguistic Barriers in Japanese to Achieve a Sustainable Multicultural Society in Japan
- Project Leader
- IORI Isao (Hitotsubashi University)
- Project Period
- April 2019 - March 2022
Summary
Reflecting drastic changes to immigration policy by the Japanese government, foreigners seeking permanent residence in Japan will rapidly increase. Such changes will cause many problems for the Japanese population and it will be an important task of Japanese linguistics to lower the language barriers for such foreigners.
I will study some of the strategies for the simplification of some types of text, in collaboration with the natural language processing, which are necessary but difficult for foreigners to understand or produce. The following two examples represent some of those texts: one is operation manuals for fast food chains and the other is handovers (reports written to inform one caregiver to another what the former experienced at work while the latter was not at work) used in nursing homes.
One of the goals of this study is to create an editor capable of easily writing such documents (like operation manuals and handovers) by collecting the documents, analyzing them linguistically, extracting their linguistic characteristics, and combining them.
