Development of an online accent dictionary and a reading tutor to support teaching and learning of Japanese prosody

Through tight collaboration with teachers of Japanese, an online accent dictionary and a reading tutor are developed to support teaching and learning of Japanese prosody. In this development, techniques of natural language processing and spoken language processing are effectively applied. What makes teaching and learning of Japanese accent difficult is the fact that word accent of Japanese often changes due to its context. In this paper, firstly, we focus on verbs and adjectives because their accent changes are relatively systematic. A web-based dictionary system of presenting their accent changes visually, auditorily, and comprehensively is developed. Then, another tutoring system of displaying the pitch pattern and the accent nucleus locations of an any given sentence is developed for teaching and learning of Japanese intonation. Objective and/or subjective evaluation experiments are done for these systems by using teachers and students of Japanese as subjects. The results show very high educational effectiveness of the systems. Currently, the systems are freely available in public under the name of OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) and they are effectively used in Japanese classes all over the world.