Koki Uchiyama

Graph-based Word Clustering using a Web Search Engine

Word clustering is important for automatic thesaurus construction, text classification, and word sense disambiguation. Recently, several studies have reported using the web as a corpus. This paper proposes an unsupervised algorithm for word clustering based on a word similarity measure by web counts. Each pair of words is queried to a search engine, which produces a co-occurrence matrix. By calculating the similarity of words, a word co-occurrence graph is obtained. A new kind of graph clustering algorithm called Newman clustering is applied for efficiently identifying word clusters. Evaluations are made on two sets of word groups derived from a web directory and WordNet.

The possibility of social media analysis for disaster management

Collecting, sharing, and delivering information in disaster situations is crucially important. Mass media such as TV, radio, and newspapers have played important roles in information distribution in past disasters and crises. Recently, social media have received much attention for their use as an information sharing tool. Especially, it is said that people used Twitter to collect and share information in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake. In academic fields, some researchers have started to propose some methods and systems for disaster management by analyzing social media data. Other people doubt whether social media will actually function effectively for disaster management because of uncertainty and inaccuracies related to rumors and misunderstanding. In this paper, we overview current studies of social media analysis for disaster management and explain some studies in detail to show their possibility and availability. We specifically examine situational awareness, user behavior analysis and information propagation analysis, which are three approaches to social media analysis, to clarify what social media analysis can and cannot do. Additionally, we propose some concepts for social media analysis and show how those concepts help to collaborate with us, researchers in social media analysis fields and other research fields.

A Scripting Language for Multimodal Presentation on Mobile Phones

Mobile phones have become indispensible devices. At the same time, their computing capabilities and graphical resources keep getting higher until 3D embodied character agent with attractive movements can be realized. In order to get this rich data presentation to target users, however, the author needs to deal with various programming works. In this paper, we propose a simple scripting language that keeps difficult works from ordinary user but allows sufficient attractive character controls.