Finding picture books suitable for a child

Reading picture books to children attracts the attention of educators as a way of aiding children’s language and cognitive development. We built a similarity book search system that we can easily find suitable books for our children from the many published picture books. We developed a morphological analyzer that is robust for hiragana and katakana words that are difficult to analyze correctly, and this made it possible to analyze picture books with great precision. Furthermore, taking the words in each stage of an infant’s development into consideration, we devised a high-speed similarity search technique by using a graph search algorithm. In future, we expect this approach to be applied to a system for recommending picture books and an educational program to assist children’s language development, and a supporting system capable of creating new picture books for each child.