Takao Nakaguchi

Infrastructure for Language Service Composition

Although English has become the standard language in various areas, most people do not use it in local activities. To increase the mutual understanding of different cultures with different languages, it is essential to build a language infrastructure on top of the Internet that improves the accessibility and usability of existing online language services so that users can create new cross-language services for their communities. To realize this infrastructure, this paper proposes the language grid. The language grid consists of the ”horizontal language grid,” which connects the standard languages of nations, and ”vertical language grid,” which combines the language services generated by communities. This approach can facilitate intercultural collaboration through the Internet, such as international online collaborative learning.

Service Grid Architecture

The Language Grid is an infrastructure for enabling users to share language services developed by language specialists and end user communities. Users can also create new services to support their intercultural/multilingual activities by composing language services from a range of providers. Since the Language Grid takes the service-oriented collective intelligence approach, the platform requires the services management to satisfy stakeholders’ needs: access control for service providers, dynamic service composition for service users, and service grid composition and system configurability for service grid operators. To realize the Language Grid, this chapter describes the design concept and the system architecture of the platform based on the service grid.

Multi-Language Discussion Platform for Wikipedia Translation

The multilingual Wikipedia is the largest existing collaboratively edited encyclopedia, where several translation communities are working towards translating Wikipedia articles. The different language communities are largely independent in terms of policy creation, behavior and community mechanisms. We conducted a case study on the Wikipedia community from a multilingual point of view to better understand community behavior. We also conducted a collaborative Wiki-to-Wiki translation experiment using machine translation tools provided by the Language Grid. Based on the findings of the two studies we designed and developed a multi-language discussion platform for Wikipedia translation communities. In this chapter, we discuss the results of the case study and a laboratory experiment and how the results are applied to facilitate the creation of multilingual collective intelligence in Wikipedia through a multi-language discussion platform.

Multiagent Gaming System for Multilingual Communication

The internationalization of economic and social activities is forcing people who use different languages and belong to different cultures to collaborate far more often. An analysis of the status of multilingual communications among such people is required. We apply gaming simulation methods to analyze this topic. In this study, we design an environment that can game multilingual communication online by describing just simple game scripts. This advance is significant as people with domain knowledge of the applied problem are not always computer experts.

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.

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.

QoS-Aware Service Composition in Mobile Environments

Service composition involves combining many existing services to solve a complex task in the service-oriented environment. Due to the progress in modern smart devices, mobile devices can now act as service providers. The mobility of mobile service providers and the dynamism of the mobile environment are unique features. As a result, there are two issues with service composition in mobile environments: (1) how to use the mobility of devices as an non-functional Quality of Service (QoS) criterion, and (2) how to deal with the dynamism of the mobile environment to realize the optimal service composition. In order to deal with above issues, we proposed a QoS-aware service composition model for service composition in mobile environments considering the feature of mobility in the mobile environment. Moreover, we proposed an adaptive approach called k-neighbor. The main idea of k-neighbor approach is to decompose the composite service into smaller elementary composite services then to set up a solution plan for those elementary composite services based on the available provider set. The evaluation shows that the way of decomposing a composite service adapts to different dynamism of the environment.

Language Service Composition Based on Higher Order Functions

To support multi-language activities, various composite services are created by a service composition that combines existing services or changes the combination of services composed by existing composite services. Multi-language activities have a wide variety of domains and their needs may change with the participants or situations, so service composition must be able to freely create various services to suit the languages of the participants and/or domains of the activity targets. Since existing service composition technologies relies on the deployment process of created composite services toward service infrastructure for users to find and execute them, delay and costs are expensive. To solve this problem, we propose a method that introduces the concept of higher order functions. In concrete, we regard services as functions and pass the functions invoked from composite services as runtime parameters of composite services to compose services without any deployment processes, this yields service composition that can efficiently support multi-language activities. We apply the proposals to Language Grid, designed to gather and provide language services, and evaluate the results. They show that our proposals can create various composite services at runtime with quite practical overheads.

Federated Grid Architecture for Language Services

The existing platforms designed to ensure interoperability of language services define their own data format and annotation vocabularies. To construct a comprehensive language service infrastructure, various types of language services supporting different languages need to be connected to the platforms. However, it is difficult for a single operator to collect and organize services for two key reasons: what kinds of language services are registered depends on the purpose of the platforms, and the language resources are characterized by their locality. Therefore, federation of the platforms across regions is essential to establish the comprehensive infrastructure desired. In this chapter, we extend the existing service grid architecture to federate heterogeneous as well as homogeneous language service platforms. To this end, we introduce an upper-level ontology for a service grid that facilitates the semantic integration of domain ontologies and guides the development of new domain ontologies. Moreover, we also introduce a federated grid architecture that can share language service registries, and compose language services across service grids.