Keita Tsuji

Automatic Extraction of Translational Japanese-KATAKANA and English Word Pairs from Bilingual Corpora

A method to automatically extract translational Japanese-KATAKANA and English word pairs from bilingual corpora is proposed. The method applies all the existing back-transliteration rules to each mora unit in a KATAKANA word, and extracts the English word which matches or partially matches one of these back-transliteration candidates as translation. The mora unit is a Japanese syllable unit and one Katakana character often corresponds to one mora. For instance, if we have in the Japanese part of a bilingual corpora, we generate such back-transliteration candidates as , , ,… and identify similar words from the English part of the corpora. The method performs reasonably well, achieving 80%–100% precision at 75% recall against the eight corpora we used for evaluation.

Automatic thesaurus generation through multiple filtering

In this paper, we propose a method of generating bilingual keyword clusters or thesauri from parallel or comparable bilingual corpora. The method combines morphological and lexical processing, bilingual word aligmnent, and graph-theoretic cluster generation. An experiment shows that the method is promising.

Assessing information literacy competency of Information Science and Library Management graduate students of Dhaka University

The aim of this study is to assess the information literacy competency of Information Science and Library Management (ISLM) graduate students at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and to determine their strengths and weaknesses. In general it was found that students had limited skills in the area of information literacy, as it is not discussed extensively in their academic course curriculum. This study urges the incorporation of an information literacy programme in the course curriculum, and more writing, discussion and other relevant issues that will make the students more information literate.

A method for the comparative analysis of concentration of author productivity, giving consideration to the effect of sample size dependency of statistical measures

In this article, we propose a method for the comparative analysis of concentration in author productivity distributions. We define the notion of concentration on the basis of two viewpoints (absolute and relative concentration) and select G (Ginis index) and V (the number of authors) as suitable measures for these two viewpoints. We then discuss the statistical peculiarity of author productivity data (i.e., most of the statistical measures change systematically according to changes in the sample size) and we explain our method using developmental profiles, which takes into account the sample size dependency of statistical measures. Finally, by applying it to actual data, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.

Bridging digital divide in Bangladesh: study on community information centers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss different attempts that have been made to bridge the digital divide in Bangladesh, with special focus on the Community Information Centers (CICs), which are playing a unique and innovative role in reducing the digital gap.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a case study and is based on a survey method for collecting information through telephone (outbound call center). Besides these, internet, personal visits (as a project member) and other secondary sources such as research reports, Grameenphone internal reports, articles are used.Findings – This paper highlights the existing initiatives which are bridging the break to build digital Bangladesh and focuses on how CIC is bridging the divide.Research limitations/implications – This study will usher a new era for its internal values and the findings can be used by the advisory committees. The outcome of this study may, however, empower policy makers to make a decision and it is suggested that discussio...

Analysis of the relationship between citation frequency of patents and diversity of their backward citations for Japanese patents

Conventional patent citation analyses have focused mainly on the presence of citation relationships, the number of patents cited by the subject patent, and the number of times the subject patent is cited by others (i.e., the numbers of backward and forward citations of the subject patent). However, most of them have not focused on patent classifications. Assuming that a patent based on a variety of technological bases tends to be an important patent that is cited more often, this study examines and clarifies the relationship between the diversity of classifications assigned to backward citations and the number of forward citations for Japanese patents. The results show notable differences in the number of classifications assigned to backward citations between the often cited and less frequently cited groups. It is considered that the diversity of backward citations can be utilized in the evaluation criteria for grouping that roughly identifies the often cited patents or eliminates a large part of less frequently cited patents.

Effects of Allowing Food and Drinks in Japanese Libraries

We investigated the effects of the current practice of allowing food and drinks in Japanese libraries. A questionnaire was sent to 1000 libraries, of which 356 public and 329 university libraries responded. Over half the respondent libraries allow food and drinks in the library. They also report an increase in library use based on measurements such as the number of gate counts after they changed the policy regarding food and drinks in the library. Furthermore, most of the responding librarians did not report a noticeable increase in related stains after relaxing the policy and many users gave favorable evaluations for allowing food and drinks in libraries.

Library and Information Science Education in Japan: Results of a 2005 Survey of Shisho Certification

Shisho is a qualified public librarian in Japan and the qualifications are set by Japanese Library Law. Shisho is very popular among university students and more than 10,000 of them obtain this certification each year. However, there are only about 14,000 full-time public librarians in Japan. Therefore, only a few students can get full-time jobs in public libraries, even if they get the Shisho certificates. In this situation, what kind of educational goals are university library and information science (LIS) instructors setting, what are the problems, and what kinds of people are the instructors? This article reports the results of a survey of LIS instructors to discover their perspectives on these and related questions regarding the educational system for library and information workers in Japan.

A Dynamic Programming Method for a Reverse Auction Model in Service Choice Markets

In recent years, there are many service providers on cloud environment. We consider a service choice market, which service providers offer a price and quality of service, users choose a combination of services based on these offers. Since this market is asymmetry information setting, appropriate pricing gives no opportunity loss to service providers. To solve this issue, a VCG based reverse auction model for the service choice market is considered. For this model, a dynamic programming method is proposed to solve. However, this work has a computational complexity issue. Therefore we propose a new dynamic programming method, which is faster than previous work.

Reference Books in Japanese Public Libraries That Provide Good Reference Services

This study investigates reference books held in (1) Japanese libraries with a high number of reference transactions and (2) libraries that consider reference services as important. The results show that the Encyclopedia of Modern Japanese Literature and the Encyclopedia of Japanese People were held in these types of libraries or municipalities. The Encyclopedia of News in the Meiji Era and the Techno Atlas of Japan were popular at relatively small municipality libraries, such as those in cities, towns, and villages, whereas the Series of Pandect of Modern Japanese Literary was popular in large municipality libraries, such as those in prefectures and special wards.