Masayuki Otani

Youth Mediated Communication: Knowledge Transfer as Intercultural Communication

Transferring knowledge to other people in different languages is difficult because of gaps in languages and cultures. It makes the knowledge transfer more difficult when the recipient is young, because the comprehension and language ability of the young are incomplete. To better understand and design language services, this chapter introduces a communication protocol that meets requirements of agriculture support in rural areas, and fully delineates the communication environment by elucidating the field issues comprehensively; solutions are considered. The field experiment conducted involves agriculture support in Vietnam. In the context of agriculture support in rural areas, there exist several issues such as the requirement of timely knowledge transfer with high translation quality, and multilingual communication between youths and experts where gaps in language ability and expertise should be considered and addressed.

Language Service Infrastructure on the Web: The Language Grid

Globalization increasingly demands multilingual communication on the Internet, as well as in local communities. To create customized collaboration tools to support multilingual communities, the authors’ Language Grid, established ten years ago, has been improving Web-based services to communities throughout the world by providing highly adaptable infrastructure and access to a wide variety of language resources.

Event management for simultaneous actions in the Internet of Things

Complex event processing (CEP) is attracting much attention as a method for analyzing streaming data in the IoT environment. Since a CEP system selects and executes a rule from rules that match identified events, i.e., multiple rules are sequentially executed. This, however, causes a problem in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment since rule execution is slow and the remaining rules must wait to be executed. Simply executing rules in parallel may trigger interference between rules, and thus unexpected and undesirable results. This paper extends the traditional CEP system by developing an execution model for parallel rule firing in the IoT environment so as to be able to execute multiple rules in parallel without any interference. We start with an extended parallel firing condition by adding the definition of dependency between sensors and actuators to the condition. Next, we extend synchronization control of parallel firing so as to avoid the interference among rules that can occur when actions take a lot of time to execute. This paper reveals that the extended CEP system (i) realizes triple parallelism (i.e., data parallelism, task parallelism, and pipeline parallelism) in the IoT environment and (ii) avoids the case where rule execution triggers unexpected results.

Analysis of Multi-language Knowledge Communication Service in Intercultural Agricultural Support

This paper proposes the design process of knowledge communication with constructing the common knowledge and evaluates it by improving the knowledge communication between Japanese experts and Vietnamese children in agricultural support project in Vietnam as a case study. From the analysis of experiment in 2nd and 3rd seasons, we have revealed the following implications: (i) the proposed design process is able to improve the knowledge communication environments; and (ii) that communication in each community is important in knowledge communication to encourage users to accept new knowledge and experts to cooperate with other experts.

Language Mashup: Personal Grid for Language Resources

This paper proposes a language service infrastructure for personal use called Language Mashup. It enables users to develop domain-specific multilingual applications on their personal devices by combining various kinds of language services created from the language resources provided by both academia and industry. To discuss the potential of Language Mashup, this paper introduces two key communication problems, and then our solution of a multilingual application that supports international meetings whose participants come from various countries and communicate with each other in their own languages.

Language Mashup: Personalized Language Service Platform

The aim of the Language Grid is to enable users to develop new language services by sharing and combining any existing language resources as language services. To implement this concept, we had to address the following problems: (1) only organization agents can register and invoke services, i.e., private users cannot invoke services on the Language Grid directly. Private users are able to use only the applications that have been developed and published non-commercially; (2) using the resources of mobile devices and services in the cloud is hindered by mismatches such as different communication protocols and different input and output methods. This chapter introduces a language service infrastructure for personal use called Language Mashup. It enables users to develop and install domain-specific multilingual applications on their smart personal devices by combining various kinds of language services created from the language resources provided by both academia and industry, and located on cloud servers or on mobile devices.

Learning culturally situated dialogue strategies to support language learners

Successful language learning requires an understanding of the target culture in order to make valuable usage of the learned language. To understand a foreign culture, language students need the knowledge of its related products, as well as the skill of comparing them to those of their own culture. One way for students to understand foreign products is by making Culturally Situated Associations (CSA), i.e., relating the products they encountered to products from their own culture. In order to provide students with CSA that they can understand, we must gather information about their culture, provide them with the CSA, and make sure they understand it. In this case, a Culturally Situated Dialogue (CSD) must take place. To carry the dialogue, dialogue systems must follow a dialogue strategy. However, previous work showed that handcrafted dialogue strategies were shown to be ineffective in comparison with machine-learned dialogue strategies. In this research, we proposed a method to learn CSD strategies to support foreign students, using a reinforcement learning algorithm. Since no previous system providing CSA was implemented, the method allowed the creation of CSD strategies when no initial data or prototype exists. The method was applied to generate three different agents: the novice agent was based on an eight states feature-space, the intermediate agent was based on a 144 states feature-space, and the advanced agent was based on a 288 states feature-space. Each of these agents learned a different dialogue strategy. We conducted a Wizard of Oz experiment during which, the agents’ role was to support the wizard in their dialogue with students by providing them with the appropriate action to take at each step. The resulting dialogue strategies were evaluated based on the quality of the strategy. The results suggest the use of the novice agent at the first stages of prototyping the dialogue system. The intermediate agent and the advanced agent could be used at later stages of the system’s implementation.

A Culturally-Situated Agent to Support Intercultural Collaboration

While traveling, foreign visitors encounter new products that they need to understand. One solutionis by making Culturally Situated Associations (CSA) i.e. relating the products they encounter to products in their own culture. We propose the design of a system that provides tourists with CSA to help them understand foreign products. In order to provide tourists with CSA that they can understand, we must gather information about their culture, provide them with the CSA, and make sure they understand it. To deliver CSA to foreign visitors, two types of data are needed: data about the products, their associated properties and relationships, and data about the tourist cultural attributes such as country, region, language. The properties and relationships about countries, regions and products, can be extracted from open linked data on the web, and CSA can then be constructed. However, information about the tourist’s cultural attributes and the knowledge they can relate to is unavailable. One way to tackle this problem would be to extract the tourist’s cultural attributes that are needed in each situation through dialogue systems. In this case, a Culturally Situated Dialogue (CSD) must take place. To implement the dialogue, dialogue systems must follow a machine-learned dialogue strategy as previous work has shown that a machine-learned dialogue strategy outperform the handcrafted dialogue approach. We propose the design of a system that uses a reinforcement learning algorithm to learn CSD strategies that can support individual foreign tourists. Since no previous system providing CSA has been implemented, the system allows the creation of CSD strategies when no initial data or prototype exists. The method is used to generate 3 different agents that learn 3 different dialogue strategies.

A Value Co-Creation Model for Multi-Language Knowledge Communication

This paper aims at investigating the formation process of value co-creation in the real fields by using a case study of multi-language knowledge communication. We use the YMC (Youth Mediated Communication)-Viet project, an agricultural support project for Vietnamese farmers by Japanese experts through children of the farmers, where the end-to-end value co-creation is between the Japanese experts and Vietnamese farmers. On one hand, Japanese experts provide agriculture knowledge to Vietnamese farmers for solving problems in the paddy or increasing their knowledge. On the other hand, Vietnamese farmers send field data to Japanese experts for providing more accurate knowledge and collecting data for further analysis. However, we have to consider several problems due to the complexity of the real fields. First, translation between different languages should be worked out to support the knowledge transfer. Second, since there are different stakeholders in the project, the various incentives from the stakeholders should be considered. Iterative service design approach is applied to address the complexity of such real field problems, where the formation process of value co-creation can be realized by several stages: proposing individual services, modeling value co-creation for individual services, and designing the structure of different value co-creation layers for the overall service. As a result, we propose a hierarchical value co-creation model for multi-language knowledge communication, including language communication, knowledge communication, and organizational communication. Moreover, we investigate the issues and possible solutions for each layer in the model.

Field-Oriented Service Design: A Multiagent Approach

Service has been considered as value co-creation through the cooperation of service providers and customers. This paper, however, focuses on service design in problem fields where complex issues exist among various stakeholders, where identifying service providers and customers is not a simple process. In other words, we focus on a very early stage of service design with huge ambiguities; we call it field-oriented service design. A typical case is introducing new services in developing countries. The main issue here is to create new services compatible with existing services through action research that considers a wide variety of regional, national and global stakeholders. It is often difficult to identify the influence of/to the services to be designed due to the differences in culture, language and business customs. As a result, unexpected interdependencies among services together with stakeholders are often revealed during the process of action research. To resolve this ambiguity in the design process, we propose a multiagent approach that couples role playing games with participatory simulations; it is based on our experiences in agricultural support projects in Southeast Asia.