Towards an Entertaining Natural Language Generation System: Linguistic Peculiarities of Japanese Fictional Characters

One of the key ways of making dialogue agents more attractive as conversation partners is characterization, as it makes the agents more friendly, humanlike, and entertaining. To build such characters, utterances suitable for the characters are usually manually prepared. However, it is expensive to do this for a large number of utterances. To reduce this cost, we are developing a natural language generator that can express the linguistic styles of particular characters. To this end, we analyze the linguistic peculiarities of Japanese fictional characters (such as those in cartoons or comics and mascots), which have strong characteristics. The contributions of this study are that we (i) present comprehensive categories of linguistic peculiarities of Japanese fictional characters that cover around 90% of such characters’ linguistic peculiarities and (ii) reveal the impact of each category on characterizing dialogue system utterances.