An Approach toward Register Classification of Book Samples in the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese

要旨

Japanese books are usually classified into ten genres by Nippon Decimal Classification (NDC) based on their subject. However, this classification is sometimes insufficient for corpus studies which describe characteristics of the texts in the book. Here, we propose a method of classifying text samples taken from Japanese books into some registers and text types. Firstly, we discuss useful criteria to describe various characteristics of the texts and propose a two-step approach for stable annotation. We then apply our method to 161 book samples from the prerelease version of the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), a balanced Japanese corpus comprising 100 million words developed by National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. Finally, we evaluate our method in terms of stability of annotation using kappa coefficients and correlation coefficients.

主題