International Journal on Natural Language Computing (IJNLC) Vol.11, No.

1, February 2022

EXTRACTING LINGUISTIC SPEECH

PATTERNS OF JAPANESE FICTIONAL
CHARACTERS USING SUBWORD UNITS
Mika Kishino1 and Kanako Komiya2
1
Ibaraki University, Ibaraki, Japan
2
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Tokyo, Japan

ABSTRACT
This study extracted and analyzed the linguistic speech patterns that characterize Japanese anime or game
characters. Conventional morphological analyzers, such as MeCab, segment words with high
performance, but they are unable to segment broken expressions or utterance endings that are not listed in
the dictionary, which often appears in lines of anime or game characters. To overcome this challenge, we
propose segmenting lines of Japanese anime or game characters using subword units that were proposed
mainly for deep learning, and extracting frequently occurring strings to obtain expressions that
characterize their utterances. We analyzed the subword units weighted by TF/IDF according to gender,
age, and each anime character and show that they are linguistic speech patterns that are specific for each
feature. Additionally, a classification experiment shows that the model with subword units outperformed
that with the conventional method.

KEYWORDS
Pattern extraction, Characterization of fictional characters, Subword units, Linguistic speech patterns,
word segmentation.

1. INTRODUCTION
There is research in the field of natural language processing that focuses on linguistic styles and
characterizes utterances of confined groups categorized by some features like gender or age.
Japanese is a language whose expressions vary depending on gender, age, and relationships with
dialog partners. In particular, Japanese anime and game characters sometimes speak with
emphasis on character rather than reality. Furthermore, the way of talking of Japanese fictional
characters is sometimes different from real people. For example, Funassyi, a Japanese mascot
character, usually ends each utterance with “なっしー, nassyi” yet this ending is not found in a
Japanese dictionary. Additionally, a cat character tends to add “にゃん, nyan”, an onomatopoeia
that expresses a cry of a cat at the end of each utterance. Human characters also have character-
specific linguistic speech patterns in novels, anime, and games. They are known as role language
[1] and it is related to characterization; the role language shows what role the speaker plays, and
sometimes it is different from real conversation. For example, “僕, boku, I” is a first-person
singular usually used for boys in novels, anime, and games, but it is also used for men and boys
in real life. Therefore, in this study, we extracted and analyzed the linguistic speech patterns that
characterize these characters using utterances of anime or game characters. In Japanese,
morphological analysis is a basic technology for natural language processing because Japanese
does not have word delimiters between words. Word segmentation and morphological analysis
are now widely performed using morphological analyzers like MeCab and Chasen and their

DOI: 10.5121/ijnlc.2022.11101 1
 International Journal on Natural Language Computing (IJNLC) Vol.11, No.1, February 2022
performances are usually very high level. However, they are unable to segment broken
expressions or the endings of utterances that are not found in the dictionary, which often appears
in lines of anime or game characters (refer to Section 2). To hinder this problem, we propose
using subword units to segment lines of Japanese anime or game characters and extracting strings
that occur frequently (refer to Section 3). The subword units are usually used with deep learning
technologies and their robustness for out-of-vocabulary words is often noted. However, they are
less interpretable than the original words because the segmentation are depending on the
frequencies or occurrence probabilities rather than the meanings. In the current study, however,
we show that the expressions extracted using subword units are more interpretable than those
using the original words for the extractions of linguistic speech patterns of fictional characters,
which is the case where many words are not listed in the dictionary using data collected from
publications on the internet (refer to Section 4). We also show that the subword units are effective
even though no deep learning technology is used with them. In the experiment, we weighted the
subword units by TF/IDF according to gender, age, and each anime character (refer to Sections 5)
and show that they are linguistic speech patterns that are specific for each feature (refer to
Sections 7 and 8). Additionally, we performed a classification experiment using a support vector
machine (SVM) based on linguistic speech patterns we extracted to classify the characters into a
character group (refer to Sections 6) and showed that a subword unit model outperformed a
conventional morphological analyzer (refer to Sections 7 and 8). Finally, we conclude our work
in Section 9. This paper is an extended version of “Extraction of Linguistic Speech Patterns of
Japanese Fictional Characters Using Subword Units”, published in the proceedings of 10th
International Conference on Natural Language Processing (NLP 2021).

2. RELATED WORK
Japanese does not have word delimiters between words and word boundaries in Japanese are
unspecific. Therefore, there has been much research on Japanese word segmentation or
morphological analysis and there are many morphological analyzers for Japanese texts like
MeCab [2], Chasen, Juman++ [3], and KyTea [4], These morphological analyzers segment words
with high performances but sometimes the performances decrease for the noisy texts. For
Japanese word segmentation of noisy texts, Sasano et al. [5] proposed a simple approach to
unknown word processing, including unknown onomatopoeia in Japanese morphological
analysis. Saito et al. [6] also recommend using character-level and word-level normalization to
address the morphological analysis of noisy Japanese texts. Recently, algorithms for subword
unis such as Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) [7] and unigram language model [8] are proposed. They
are mainly proposed for neural machine translation and usually used with deep learning
technologies. We used the unigram language model for word segmentation of Japanese lines of
fictional characters. There are some studies on interpretability and usability of words depending
on the word segmentation for information retrieval (IR). Kwok [9] investigated and compared 1-
gram, bigram, and short-word indexing for IR. Nie et al. [10] proposed the longest-matching
algorithm with single characters for Chinese word segmentation for IR. In addition, there has
been much research on characterization. PERSONAGE (personality generator) developed by
Mairesse and Walker [11] as, the first highly parametrizable conversational language generator.
They produced recognizable linguistic variation and personality, and our work also focused on
each character's personality. Walker et al. [12] reported a corpus of film dialog collected and
annotated for linguistic structures and character archetypes. Additionally, they conducted
experiments on their character models to classify linguistic styles depending on groups such as
genre, gender, directors, and film period. Miyazaki et al. [13] conducted a fundamental analysis
of Japanese linguistic expressions that characterize speeches for developing a technology to
characterize conversations by partially paraphrasing them. In their subsequent research, Miyazaki
et al. [14] reported categories of linguistic peculiarities of Japanese fictional characters. Miyazaki
et al. [15] conducted an experiment to see whether the reader can understand the characterization
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of a dialog agent by paraphrasing the functional part of each sentence with a probability suitable
for the target character, as a way to characterize the speech and to enrich the variation of the
speeches. Another study focused on Japanese sound change expressions to characterize speeches
of Japanese fictional characters; they collected these expressions and classified them [16].
Additionally, Okui and Nakatsuji [17] used a pointer generating mechanism to generate various
responses for a Japanese dialog system, referring to several different character responses. They
learned the characterization of the responses with a small amount of data.

3. EXTRACTION OF LINGUISTIC SPEECH PATTERNS USING SUBWORD

UNITS
Many terms not included in the dictionary such as expressions with characterization at the
endings of utterances and broken expressions appear in fictional character dialogs. As a result,
using existing morphological analyzers with dictionaries to segment the lines of fictional
characters are challenging. Therefore, we propose using subword units for the segmentation of
lines of fictional characters. The concept behind subword units is that the frequency of
occurrence of a word is studied in advance, and low-frequency words are broken down into
letters and smaller words. In other words, using subword units, we can treat a string with a high
frequency of occurrence as a single unit, not a word in a dictionary. We used software referred to
SentencePiece [18] for word segmentation of Japanese lines of fictional characters.
SentencePiece learns the segment method directly from the text and segments the text into
subword units. It supports BPE and unigram language model, but we employed unigram language
model because it slightly outperformed BPE when they were used for machine translation.

3.1. Unigram Language Model

We explain the algorithm of unigram language model quoting from [8]. The unigram language
model makes an assumption that each subword occurs independently, and consequently, the
probability of a subword sequence is formulated as the product of the subword
occurrence probabilities . The most probable segmentation for the input sentence is
obtained with the Viterbi algorithm. Because the vocabulary set is unknown, they seek to find
them with the following iterative algorithm.

1. Heuristically make a reasonably big seed vocabulary from the training corpus.
2. Repeat the following steps until reaches a desired vocabulary size.
(a) Fixing the set of vocabulary, optimize with the EM algorithm.
(b) Compute the for each subword , where lossi represents how likely the likelihood is
reduced when the subword is removed from the current vocabulary.
(c) Sort the symbols by and keep top % of subwords.

Unigram language model is a method whose objective function is maximization of log likelihood
of "X" .

3.2. Procedures

We extracted linguistic speech patterns that characterize the lines as follows:

1. Collect lines of fictional characters,

2. Segment the lines into subword units using SentencePiece, and
3. Weighted the subword units using TF/IDF values and obtain the top ten subword units.

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In addition to the extraction experiments, we conducted classification experiments of characters.
Finally, we compared the results of the method using SentencePiece with that of one of the de
facto standard morphological analyzers for Japanese, MeCab. We used ipadic for Japanese
dictionary of MeCab.

4. DATA
We collected dialogs of 103 characters from 20 publications on the internet. They are, Anohana:
The Flower We Saw That Day, Den-noh Coil, Dragon Quest IV-VIII, Neon Genesis Evangelion,
Mobile Suit Gundam, Howl's Moving Castle, Hyouka, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Kemono
Friends, Harem Days, Whisper of the Heart, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away,
Symphogear, My Neighbour Totoro, and The Promised Neverland. This corpus of dialogs is
referred as to the “Character Corpus.” The following three methods were used for the collection.

1. They were collected from a compilation site of anime and game dialog on the internet.
2. They were collected from anime video sites.
3. It was converted from manga e-books using a text detection application.

Priority was given to characters with many lines while choosing character in the work.
Furthermore, since it was assumed that the majority of the main characters would be mostly
classified as boys, girls or younger men or women, we aggressively collected child and older
characters with a significant number of dialogs during the selection process. Because we have
classification experiments according to age, characters whose ages change drastically during the
story have been removed. An example of this is Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle. She changed
from 18 to 90 years old in the movie. We also eliminated characters with extremely low amounts
of dialog. The minimum, maximum and average numbers of lines of a character are respectively
92, 6,797, and 1,187.17.

4. EXPERIMENTS OF LINGUISTIC SPEECH PATTERN EXTRACTION

The procedure of linguistic speech pattern extraction by SentencePiece is as follows. First, we
develop a segmentation model by applying SentencePiece to each character's dialog. Notably, we
apply SentencePiece to sub-corpus of each character rather than the entire corpus. This is because
the way of talking varies according to each character. The following formula calculates the
maximum number of subword units:

(1)

where, denotes the number of letters of each character's lines, denotes the total number of
letters of lines of all characters, and denotes basic vocabulary size. We set to
3,000. Simultaneously with the creation of the model, a word list from the vocab file was also
constructed. We delete from the word list subword units that consist of a single Chinese character
except for the first-person singular (僕, 私, 俺) because we believed that they would not express a
characterization. We also deleted 1/5 of the subword units with less emission logarithmic
establishment, which is a measure of a subword unit’s occurrence probability. As a result, the
number of words was 9114. For the next step, we segment the character corpus using the
segmentation model we created. The word lists and segmented character corpus were used to
obtain the TF/IDF value, which was calculated using the following formula

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(2)

where, denotes the term frequency of a subword unit in document , denotes the
number of occurrences of a subword unit in document , denotes the sum of the
number of occurrences of all subword units in the document .

(3)

where, denotes the inverse document frequency of a subword unit , denotes total number
of documents, denotes number of documents in which a subword unit occurred.

(4)

We extracted linguistic speech patterns that characterize lines of gender, ages, and characters
using TF/IDF value. We considered the lines of all characters of one gender as one document,
and the lines of all character of the opposite gender as another document when calculating the
TF/IDF value for a gender. A summary of the experimental procedure is shown in Figure 1.

Figure1. Flowchart of the extraction experiment procedure

5. CLASSIFICATION EXPERIMENT
We performed a classification experiment to evaluate the extracted linguistic speech patterns
using a SVM. The obtained TF/IDF values were used as inputs to the SVM to classify the
characters into groups categorized by gender and age. The characters were first divided into three
categories: children, adults, and seniors. Children and adults were further divided into two
categories: male and female whereas seniors have only one group because we had few characters
of the ages. As a result, we used five groups: boys, girls, men, women, and seniors. The numbers
of the character according to the group are shown in Table1. The group classification was

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performed based on the character’s characterization and not on their actual age or gender because
the profiles of fictional characters are sometimes extraordinary. The bias in the amount of data
for each category is affected by the bias in characters; Japanese anime and games we collected
have a few children and senior characters. The experiment was conducted using five-fold cross-
validation. Sklearn was used as a library in this experiment. The computational complexity of
SVM in sklearn varies between O (number of dimensionalities * number of data ^2) and O
(number of dimensionality * number of samples ^3), depending on how efficiently the cache is
used.

Table 1. Amount of data for Classification Experiment.

Boys Girls Men Women Senior

6 8 40 41 7

6. RESULTS
The linguistic speech patterns with the top 10 TF/IDF values are shown in Tables 2-7. In the
tables, E represents ending, and F means first-person singular. Tables 2 and 3 list the linguistic
speech patterns with gender characterization, and Tables 4 and 5 show those with age
characterization. In these tables, Italic means that the pattern is specific for each characterization
of fictional characters. Some of the character-specific linguistic speech patterns are also shown as
example results in Tables 6 and 7. The example characters are Emma from the anime “The
Promised Neverland,” Shinji from the anime “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” and Yangus from the
game “Dragon Quest VIII.” For the experiment of characters, we had a questionnaire to evaluate
the linguistic speech patterns. Eight native Japanese speakers were asked if each linguistic speech
pattern seems specific for the character. Five people are men, and three were women, and seven
people are in their 20's, and one person is in her 30's. They were also asked if they knew each
anime or game that the character appears. Tables 8 and 9 summarize the results of the
questionnaire. Finally, the results of the classification experiment are shown in Table 10.

Table 2. Linguistic Speech Patterns with Gender Characterization Retrieved by SentencePiece. E

represents ending and F denotes the first-person singular. Italic means that the pattern is specific for the
people of specific genders as lines of fictional characters.

Male Female
Patterns Sounds Notes Patterns Sounds Notes
ですね desune Polite E わね wane Feminine E
でござる degozaru Samurai E かしら kashira Feminine E
だぜ daze Masculine E のかしら nokashira Feminine E
でござるな degozaruna Samurai E だわ dawa Feminine E
アルス Arusu Name よね yone E
だな dana Masculine E のね none Feminine E
なあ naa Old buddy ないわ naiwa Feminine E
ますね masune Polite E わよ wayo Feminine E
でがすよ degasuyo Dialect E ないわね naiwane Feminine E
でござるよ degozaruyo Samurai E アルス Arusu Name

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Table 3. Linguistic Speech Patterns with Gender Characterization Retrieved by MeCab. E represents
ending and F denotes the first-person singular. Italic means that the pattern is specific for the people of
specific genders as lines of fictional characters.

Male Female
Patterns Sounds Notes Patterns Sounds Notes
ござる gozaru Samurai E あたし atashi F for girls
ざる zaru Error かしら kashira Feminine E
俺 ore F for male アルス Arusu Name
アルス Arusu Name 私 watashi F
オイラ oira F for boys ・ . Mark
げす gesu Dialect E しら shira Error
・ . Mark リュカ Ryuka Name
僕 boku F for boys たし tashi Error
ウィル Will Name ましょ masyo Femminine E
俺 ore F for male ウィル Will Name

Table 4. Linguistic Speech Patterns with Age Characterization Retrieved by SentencePiece. E represents
ending and F denotes the first-person singular. Italic means that the pattern is specific for the people of
specific ages as lines of fictional characters.

Children Adults Seniors

Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes
ds ds ds
なあ naa Old ですね deshu Polite E でござる degoz Samurai
buddy ne aru E
アルス Arusu Name わね wane Feminin でござる degoz Samurai
eE な aruna E
お父さん otosan Dad これ kore This でござる degoz Samurai
よ aruyo E
オイラ oira F for です deshu Polite E でござる degoz Samurai
boys か aruka E
だよ dayo E だな dana Masculi アルス殿 Arush Sir
ne E udono Arusu
いっぱい ippai Many かしら kashir Feminin 殿 dono Sir
a eE
だぞ dazo Boyish E なんて nante Exclama るでござ rudeg Samurai
tory how るよ ozaru E
yo
てる teru E アルス Arusu Name とは towa C.f.
with
るの runo Feminin どこ doko Where るでござ rudeg Samurai
eE る ozaru E
だね dane E さん san title わし washi F for old
men

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Table 5. Linguistic Speech Patterns with Age Characterization Retrieved by MeCab. E represents ending
and F denotes the first-person singular. Italic means that the pattern is specific for the people of specific
ages as lines of fictional characters.

Children Adults Seniors

Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes
ds ds ds
オイラ oira F for 俺 ore F for ござろ gozar Samurai
boys male o E
僕 boku F for ウィル Will Name ござっ goza Samurai
boys suffix
おっちゃ ochan Pops リュカ Ryuka Name など nado Such as
ん
ゃっ ya Error げす gesu Dialect フム humu Hm-hum
ちゃっ cha Error アムロ Amur Name うむ umu Hmmm
o
ちゃう chau End up - ひすい hisui Name やはり yahari As
ing expected
オラ ora F for ゃっ ya Error サントハ santoh Name
boys イム aimu
うわ uwa Wow ちゃっ cha Error いかん ikan No for
old men
じんた jinta Error アニキ aniki Bro むう muu Hmmm
オッチャ ochan Pops ドルマゲ Dhoul name ふむ humu Hm-hum
ン ス magus

Table 6. Character-specific Linguistic Speech Patterns Retrieved by SentencePiece. E represents ending

and F denotes the first-person singular.

Emma Shinji Yangus

Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes
ds ds ds
てる teru E ですか desuk Polite E でがすよ degas Dialect
a uyo
にも nimo And ミサトさ Misat Name でがす degas Dialect
ん osan with title u
ってこと ttekot That 僕は bokuh I am (F でげす deges Dialect
o means a for men) u
ちょ cho Wait ないよ naiyo there でげすよ deges Dialect
isn't uyo
いいよ iiyo OK 父さん tosan Dad でがすね degas Dialect
une
嫌だ iyada No るんだ runda E おっさん ossan Pops
の手 note Hand of 僕 boku F for かい kai E
men
私たちの watas Our だよ dayo E んでがす ndega Dialect
hitach su
ino
信じ shinji Believe 綾波 Ayana Name アッシは asshih I am for
mi a men
もし moshi If んですか ndesu E for アッシら asshir We for
ka question a men

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Table 7. Character-specific Linguistic Speech Patterns Retrieved by MeCab. E represents ending and F
denotes the first-person singular.

Emma Shinji Yangus

Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes
ds ds ds
私 watas F 僕 boku F for げす gesu Dialect
hi men
レイ Rei Name ミ mi Error がす gasu Dialect
ノーマン Noma Name サト sato Error アッ a Error
n
マン man Error 父さん tosan Dad アッシ asshi F for
men
思う omou Think さん san Title すね sune E
うん un Yes うわ uwa Wow すか suka E for
question
近寄っ chikay Draw スカ suka Error やしょ yasho Dialect
o near
折れ ore Be アスカ Asuka Name おっさん ossan Pops
folded
寄っ yo Draw トウジ Touji Name 姉ちゃん necha Sis
near n
そっ so Error 僕ら bokur We for ダンナ danna Master
a men

Table 8. Number of People Who Think the Linguistic Speech Pattern Extracted by SentencePiece is
specific for the Character and Its Percentages. W/ represents with knowledge of the anime or game and w/o
indicates without knowledge. People represents number of people with and without knowledge of the
anime or game.

Emma Shinji Yangus

Patterns w/ w/o Patterns w/ w/o Patterns w/ w/o
People 4 4 People 7 1 People 3 5
てる 0 0 ですか 0 0 でがすよ 3 4
にも 0 0 ミサトさ 1 0 でがす 3 4
ん
ってこと 0 0 僕は 3 1 でげす 3 4
ちょ 0 0 ないよ 0 0 でげすよ 3 4
いいよ 1 0 父さん 3 1 でがすね 3 4
嫌だ 3 0 るんだ 1 1 おっさん 1 2
の手 0 0 僕 2 1 かい 1 2
私たちの 4 1 だよ 0 0 んでがす 3 4
信じ 3 0 綾波 4 0 アッシは 3 3
もし 0 0 んですか 0 0 アッシら 3 3
Total 11 1 Total 14 4 Total 26 34
Percent 27.50% 2.50% Percent 20.00% 40.00% Percent 86.6 68.00%
7%
Avarage 15.00% Avarage 22.50% Avarage 75.00%

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Table 9. Number of People Who Think the Linguistic Speech Pattern Extracted by MeCab is specific for
the Character and Its Percentages. W/ represents with knowledge of the anime or game and w/o indicates
without knowledge. People represents number of people with and without knowledge of the anime or
game.

Emma Shinji Yangus

Patterns w/ w/o Patterns w/ w/o Patterns w/ w/o
People 4 4 People 7 1 People 3 5
私 0 0 僕 2 1 げす 3 4
レイ 1 0 ミ 0 0 がす 3 4
ノーマン 1 0 サト 0 0 アッ 0 0
マン 0 0 父さん 3 1 アッシ 3 3
思う 0 0 さん 0 0 すね 2 1
うん 0 0 うわ 0 0 すか 2 1
近寄っ 0 0 スカ 0 0 やしょ 2 1
折れ 0 0 アスカ 4 0 おっさん 1 2
寄っ 0 0 トウジ 0 0 姉ちゃん 0 3
そっ 0 0 僕ら 1 1 ダンナ 1 3
Total 2 0 Total 10 3 Total 17 22
Percent 5.00% 0.00% Percent 14.29% 30.00% Percent 56.67% 44.00%
Avarage 2.50% Avarage 16.25% Avarage 48.75%

Table 10. Results of Classification Experiment

SentencePiece MeCab
0.627 0.451

7. DISCUSSION
7.1. Discussion of the extraction experiment

Tables 2-7 shows that regardless of whether the SentencePiece or MeCab model is used, many
endings of utterances and first-person singulars are extracted as specific linguistic speech patterns.
We believe that they substantially characterize Japanese dialog. Many personal names are also
extracted, although they are not linguistic speech patterns, because they often appeared in the
lines of characters. MeCab found 13 error expressions whereas the SentencePiece model found
none. Here, an error means the expression has no meaning due to a segmentation error. This
result indicates that a conventional morphological analyzer sometimes fails to segment unusual
sentences such as lines of fictional characters. Furthermore, we can observe from the tables that
the SentencePiece model can obtain linguistic speech patterns that consist of many words. For
example, “desune” consists of “desu” and “ne” and “wane” consists of “wa” and “ne.” The
SentencePiece model could retrieve these linguistic speech patterns because it used subword units.
In Mecab, on the other hand, the word "アッシ, asshi" was split into "アッ, a" and "シ, shi". "ア
ッシ, Asshi" is the first person singular of Yangus, and it is one word, splitting it would cause an
error. As you can see, many errors occurred in the Mecab extraction process when splitting words
that were not in the dictionary.

Furthermore, the SentencePiece model retrieved seven masculine and nine feminine linguistic
speech patterns for the gender experiment, whereas MeCab retrieved six masculine and four
feminine linguistic speech patterns. SentencePiece extracted a large number of endings that
represent gender characteristics. For example, "だぜ, daze" and "だな, dana" are often used by

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men as endings of utterances. And "わね, wane" and "かしら, kashira," are thought to be found
in the endings of female speeches. Although not listed in table2, the first person singular was also
taken to indicate gender characteristics. For example "私, watashi" is a first person singular
mostly for women and "俺, ore" is that for men in fictions. In the extraction using SentencePiece,
many feature words were obtained in addition to the top 10 words. Also, MeCab extracted
symbols and words that did not express the meaning and did not capture the features as well as
SentencePiece.

For age experiment, the SentencePiece model obtained six, two, and seven linguistic speech
patterns that are children, adults, and seniors, respectively, whereas MeCab retrieved six, one,
seven linguistic speech patterns. For example, "お父さん, Otosan" means dad is a commonly
used word, but we thought this was indicative of age characteristics, because we could imagine it
being used in situations where children call their parent. Although "いっぱい, ippai" means
many, is also a commonly used word, there are other paraphrases such as "たくさん, takusan"
and "多 く , ooku", but this is a particularly childish expression, so we considered it as a
characteristic word. The honorific "さん, san" is not often used by children in anime and games,
and it is not used so often by older people because their position and age are often higher than
those of other characters. Also, if anything, children in anime and games tend to use "ちゃん,
chan" instead of "さん, san". The word in table 5 "おっちゃん, ochan," which is a characteristic
word for children, is not often used by adults because it can be seen as a rude expression. The
first person singular for children, "僕, boku" is used by men in real life, but in anime and games,
it is often used by child characters. "オイラ, Oira" and “オラ, ora” is also used by child
characters in anime and games, but not in real life. The characteristic words of the senior
generation, such as "ふむ, hmm" and "うむ, um", are often used as a gesture of thinking by the
senior generation. For the experiment of ages, the difference between the two models was smaller
than that of gender. We believe that the systems could not extract linguistic speech patterns
specific for adults because their talking way is considered normal. In the table2-5 that shows the
results of the experiment of extracting linguistic speech patterns for age and gender,
SentencePiece extracted mostly ending of utterances, while MeCab extracted not only ending of
utterances but also first person singulars and broken expressions such as "おっちゃん, ochan". In
the tables of the experiments, it may seem that Mecab extracted more kinds of feature words than
SentencePiece. However, most of the feature words extracted by Mecab could also be extracted
by SentencePiece. The examples of the linguistic speech patterns extracted by SentencePiece that
could not be showed are shown in Table 11-12.

Next, let us discuss the experiment of each character. This is more difficult than the discussion of
gender or age because the knowledge of the character can affect the results. Therefore, we had a
questionnaire for eight people. Tables 8 and 9 show that the SentencePiece model always obtains
more character-specific linguistic speech patterns than MeCab for every character. The
knowledge of the characters did not affect this result. However, the people with knowledge
considerably feel that the linguistic speech patterns are specific for Emma, but the people without
knowledge feel they are not so much. According to English Wikipedia, “The bright and cheerful
Emma is an 11-year-old orphan living in Grace Field House, a self-contained orphanage housing
her and 37 other orphans.” We believe that people without knowledge tend to think she is an
adult woman because Emma is a female name. People without knowledge could think that the
extracted patterns are not character-specific because they include no feminine patterns.
Additionally, according to the Dragon Quest Wiki, “Yangus is a character in Dragon Quest VIII
who accompanies the Hero on his missions.” and “He serves as a powerful tank character over
the course of the game.” As for Yangus, the people with knowledge feel that the linguistic speech
patterns are more character-specific again. Moreover, the percentage where people think they are

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 International Journal on Natural Language Computing (IJNLC) Vol.11, No.1, February 2022
character-specific is the highest among the three characters. We believe that this is because
Yangus speak a dialect-originated and specific language. According to English Wikipedia,
“Shinji is a dependent and introverted boy with few friends, reluctant unable to communicate
with other people and frightened by contact with strangers.” Although there could be a bias
because only one person did not know him, the person who did not know felt that the extracted
patterns were more character-specific. These results indicate that the extracted expressions using
subword units are more interpretable linguistic speech patterns than those using words. Also,
because of Emma and Shinji spoke in a way that real people also use, there were few words that
could be extracted as feature words. For characters like Yangus, who spoke in a way unique to
anime and games, more feature words could be extracted.

The system was able to successfully extract linguistic speech patterns, but it was not perfect. In
addition to linguistic speech patterns, many proper nouns and common nouns that appear
frequently in the work were extracted because this system extracts strings that appear frequently.
In particular, it is difficult to remove common nouns automatically. This is because some of the
common nouns extracted can be considered as linguistic speech patterns, such as "お父さん,
otosan", which means father, and some cannot be considered as them, such as “お城, Oshiro”,
which means castle. As a solution to these problems, the following methods can be considered.
We think that proper nouns can be removed by referring to word lists and dictionaries. Words
that are not in the dictionary or that are written as proper nouns in the dictionary are proper nouns
and can be removed. We considered that there are two types of common nouns: nouns that
describe the characteristics of characters and nouns that often appear in the story. Of these, we
want to remove the nouns that appear frequently in the story, since they do not represent the
characteristics of the characters. It may be possible to remove them by extracting words that
appear frequently in each work using the same method as in the extraction experiment. The other
problem is that there are few characters from the seniors and the children. The solution to this
problem is very difficult.

7.2. Discussion of the classification experiment

The classification results also showed that the SentencePiece model outperformed MeCab for the
classification of character groups. Additionally, it indicates that the patterns are more specific for
each character group feature. Notably, the subword units are proposed for deep learning
technologies but our classification did not use any of them. The experiments showed that the
subword units are effective when no deep learning technologies are used.

Table 11. Examples of linguistic speech patterns with gender characterization extracted by SentencePiece
from the top 11. E represents ending and F denotes the first-person singular.

Male Female
Patterns Sounds Notes Patterns Sounds Notes
んだな ndana Masculine E あたし atashi F for Female
ですな desuna Masculine E ですわ desuwa Lady E
オレ ore F for male そうね sone Feminine E
オイラ oira F for boys 私たち watashi-tachi We
行こうぜ ikoze Let’s go なさいよ nasaiyo Do it
ちまった chimatta Did it あたしたち atashi-tachi We
ないぜ naize No あんた anta You
兄貴 aniki Bro ないわよ naiwayo No
僕 boku F for male あなた anata You
お前 omae You お父さま otosama Father

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Table 12. Examples of linguistic speech patterns with age characterization extracted by SentencePiece from
the top 11. E represents ending and F denotes the first-person singular.

Children Adults Seniors

Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes Patterns Soun Notes
ds ds ds
ボク boku F for のかしら nokas E for ないでご naideg No
boys hira female ざる ozaru
お母さん okasa Mam わよ wayo E for わい wai F for
n female seniors
ねー ne Hey ません masen polite E わしら washir We
a
もん mon E for なあ naa Hey まい mai Not
children

8. CONCLUSIONS
In this study, we proposed using subword units to segment dialogs of fictional characters. The
experiments revealed that subword units weighted with TF/IDF values are character-specific
linguistic speech patterns, that cannot be obtained from existing morphological analyzers using
dictionaries. They also showed that the linguistic speech patterns retrieved using SentencePiece
are more specific for gender, age, and each character. It indicates that the extracted expressions
using subword units are more interpretable than those using words. We discussed the differences
between the extracted linguistic speech patterns retrieved using SentencePiece and famous
morphological analyzer, MeCab. We also conducted an experiment that classifies the characters
into character groups using the extracted linguistic speech patterns as features, and the
classification SentencePiece model’s accuracy was compared to the case where MeCab was used
to segment the dialogs. We showed that subword units are effective even though no deep learning
technologies are used with them. In the future, we would like to consider parts of speech when
segment terms. Also, we are interested in research to generate sentences with characterization
using the linguistic speech patterns extracted in this study.

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