Text Data Mining of English Guidebooks Available at Local Airports in Japan

Ishikawa Prefecture is located in the Hokuriku region in Japan. One of the main targets of the tourism industry in Ishikawa is to increase the number of tourists from foreign countries. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to provide foreign tourists with a “language service.” In this study, in order to understand the state of language service provided to foreign tourists, we investigated what linguistic characteristics can be found in English pamphlets at Komatsu Airport and Toyama Airport, which are local airports in Japan, comparing them with pamphlets available at Narita, Kansai, Central Japan, and London Heathrow international airports. In short, frequency characteristics of characterand word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, we calculated the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material. As a result, it was clearly shown that English pamphlets available at local airports in Japan have a similar tendency to literary writings in the characteristics of character-appearance. Besides, the values of the Kcharacteristic for the pamphlets are high, and the difficulty level is also high, especially in terms of the Japanese required vocabulary.