Picture-Book Search System “Pitarie”—Finding Appropriate Books for Each Child

In this paper, we present a novel picture-book search system Pitarie, which can find a picture book that matches a child’s interests and language developmental stage. By reading the appropriate picture book to children, positive effects such as faster language development and enhanced emotional education are expected. Pitarie searches are based on two new natural language processing technologies particularly designed for picture books: morphological analysis and text readability estimation for sentences written mainly in Hiragana script. In this paper, we introduce Pitarie with a focus on such novel technologies and their level of quality. Finally, we report the results of the questionnaire for the entire system. Books that were selected based on recommendations by Pitarie had an average rating of 4.44–4.54 on a 5-point evaluation scale from both children’s interest and language developmental stage viewpoints.