A natural language understanding system is described which extracts contextual information from Japanese texts. It integrates syntactic, semantic and contextual processing serially. The syntactic analyzer obtains rough syntactic structures from the text. The semantic analyzer treats modifying relations inside noun phrases and case relations among verbs and noun phrases. Then, the contextual ana...

Japan’s total fertility rate is very low (1.29 in 2003), and Japanese life expectancy is among the highest (78.4 years for males and 85.3 years for females at birth in 2003) in developed countries. Consequently, the population is aging rapidly, which has had a heavy impact on welfare state reform in Japan. In European healthcare reforms, early reforms in the 1980s emphasized cost containment; t...

We present a novel spelling correction method ['or those languages that have no delimiter between words, such ~rs ,lap;mese, (.',hinese, ,~nd ThM. It consists of an al)proximate word matching method and an N-best word seg mental|on Mgorithm using a statistical la.nguage model. For OCR errors, the proposed word-based correction method outperf.ornrs the conventional charactm'-b`ased correction me...

Although it is commonly assumed that social support positively predicts health, the empirical evidence has been inconsistent. We argue that three moderating factors must be considered: (1) support-approving norms (cultural context); (2) support-requiring situations (stressful events); and (3) support-accepting personal style (low neuroticism). Our large-scale cross-cultural survey of Japanese a...

Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded at the end of nonsense sequences (e.g., kaba 'hippopotamus' in gyachikaba). When the final portion of the preceding context together with the initial portion of the word (e.g., here, the sequence chika) was compatible with many lexical competitors, recognition of the embedded word was more difficult than when such a sequence was compatible wit...

This original research on Restoration Shinto Norito seeks to explain the rhetorical devices used in the composition of a morning prayer ritual text. The nativist scholar, Hirata Atsutane, crafted this ritual to create a Japanese imperial subject with a particular understanding of native identity and national unity, appropriate to the context of a Japan in the shadow of impending modernity and f...