Text Data Mining of the "Tourism English Proficiency Test"

According to the White Paper on Tourism for 2017, approximately 17 million Japanese travel abroad, and 24 million foreigners come to Japan for sightseeing in 2016. It can be said that it is just the time of sightseeing right now. Therefore, the knowledge of tourism has become more and more important, and the necessity for using English, which can be said to be a world common language, has been increased. As a measurement of English communication competence needed on the tourism site, the "Tourism English Proficiency Test" started in 1989. In this study, English sentences of the "Tourism English Proficiency Test" were examined, compared with English textbooks for junior high and high school students in terms of metrical linguistics. In short, frequency characteristics of character-and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary was calculated to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material.