Yumiko Mori

Language Grid Association: Action Research on Supporting the Multicultural Society

The Language Grid is a middleware with which people can connect and use language resources such as machine translations, morphological analyzers and others created in the fields of intercultural collaboration. The Language Grid cannot exist without the collaboration of Language Grid Users who provide language and computation resources, language services, and collaboration tools. This paper overviews Language Grid Association, a user group of the Language Grid and a body promoting action research to support the multicultural society.

Culturally-situated pictogram retrieval

This paper studies the patterns of cultural differences observed in pictogram interpretation. We conducted a 14-month online survey in the U.S. and Japan to ask the meaning of 120 pictograms used in a pictogram communication system. A total of 935 respondents in the U.S. and 543 respondents in Japan participated in the survey to submit pictogram interpretations which added up to compose an average of 147 English interpretations and 97 Japanese interpretations per pictogram. Three human judges independently analyzed the English-Japanese pictogram interpretation words, and as a result, 19 pictograms were found to have culturally different interpretations by two or more judges. The following patterns of cultural differences in pictogram interpretation were observed: (1) two cultures share the same underlying concept, but have different perspectives on the concept, (2) two cultures only partially share the same underlying concept, and (3) two cultures do not share any common underlying concept.

Pictogram retrieval based on collective semantics

To retrieve pictograms having semantically ambiguous interpretations, we propose a semantic relevance measure which uses pictogram interpretation words collected from a web survey. The proposed measure uses ratio and similarity information contained in a set of pictogram interpretation words to (1) retrieve pictograms having implicit meaning but not explicit interpretation word and (2) rank pictograms sharing common interpretation word(s) according to query relevancy which reflects the interpretation ratio.

Intercultural Communication Environment for Youth and Experts in Agriculture Support

There is ongoing research on information systems that support inter-disciplinary communication for people in different fields of expertise as well as on intercultural communication for people who speak different languages. However, there are few reports of research of systems that facilitate communication between youth and experts who speak different languages. In the presence of different languages and knowledge sets, a key issue lies in the implementing communication environments becomes difficult. This paper discusses a communication protocol designed to send/receive data and knowledge between youth and experts. This paper implements intercultural communication environment is implemented by combining machine translation services with human services to enhance communication quality. Finally, we validated the communication by applying the communication environment in agriculture support in Vietnam.

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.

Supporting a Children's Workshop with Machine Translation

Previous studies have investigated the characteristics of machine translation(MT)-mediated communication in lab settings and suggested various ways to improve it [1]. Unfortunately, we still lack an understanding of how MT is used in real-world settings, particularly when people use it to support face-to-face communication. In this paper, we report on a field study of a multilingual workshop where children from various language regions used MT to communicate with each other. We investigate how children use various information such as non-verbal cues and drawings to compensate for the mistranslations of MT. For example, children tried to understand the mistranslated messages by reading alternative translations and used web browsers to search for pictures of unknown objects. Such findings provide insights for designing future multilingual support systems.

Machine Translation Usage in a Children’s Workshop

Machine translation (MT) enables a group of people who do not share a common language to work together as a team. Previous studies have investigated the characteristics of MT-mediated communication in laboratory settings and suggested various ways to improve it. Yet, few studies have investigated how MT is actually used outside the lab. We still lack an understanding of how MT is used in real-world settings, particularly when people use it in face-to-face situations. In this paper, we report on an ethnographic study of a multilingual children workshop using MT to communicate with each other in real world. We studied how children use various communication methods such as gesture and internet to compensate for the mistranslations of MT. For example, children tried to understand poorly translated messages by reading the alternative translations and used web browsers to search for pictures of unknown objects. Finally, we propose design implementations based on our findings.

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.

Youth-Mediated Knowledge Transfer and Data Acquisition Service for Agricultural Decision Support: A Trial for Illiterate Farmers in Vietnam

Proper technology transfer based on scientific data is inevitable for farmers to promote sustainable agriculture which is a common target of modern food production. In under-developing countries, illiteracy of farmers is one of the major reasons for them to receive sufficient information and knowledge for such sustainable food production. In this study, we conducted a trial to examine effectiveness of an idea to transfer agricultural knowledge and information to illiterate farmers through their children educated at school as messengers between their illiterate parents and remote experts by utilizing several ICT tools including a multilingual machine translator which can bridge the famers and even foreign experts.

Intercultural Community Development for Kids around the World

Communication methods and tools are key factors in developing online intercultural communities, especially when community members use their own mother tongue. This chapter introduces a case of an online intercultural community for international youths in NPO Pangaea. Youths and volunteer staff are from different countries and communication in this community is not English-based. Pictograms are used for youth communication and machine translations are used for staff communication. This chapter reports the participatory design and development processes of a pictogram communication system for youths and multilingual community site for staffs. Community-based communication tools such as Pangaea Staff Community Site receive benefits from the Language Grid technology in its aspect of a collective intelligence, because the Language Grid enables community users such as Pangaea volunteers to improve machine translation quality, for example, by adding a Pangaea community dictionary.