It is very difficult for overseas students to learn Japanese polite expressions because these expressions change in a complicated manner according to context, for instance, hyponymy, social distance, and the formality of the conversational situation. Moreover, the notion of social distance in Japan often differs from that in the learner's country. This difference may result in misunderstanding ...

Entity linking (EL) is the task of connecting mentions in texts to entities in a large-scale knowledge base such as Wikipedia. In this paper, we present a pipeline system for Japanese EL which consists of two standard components, namely candidate generation and candidate ranking. We investigate several techniques for each component, using a recently developed Japanese EL corpus. For candidate g...

A’ view of nature within the framework of garden and in relation with human needs and drives that satisfy theneed to be rooted has caused the representation of nature in garden to be regarded as cultural heritage. Garden and garden designing are suitable cases for us to study cultural characteristics and traits. Thus, human beings have searched their eternal interest in an ideal and unattainabl...

Westerners’ perceptions tend to focus on salient foreground objects, whereas Asians are more inclined to focus on contexts. We hypothesized that such culturally specific patterns of attention may be afforded by the perceptual environment of each culture. In order to test this hypothesis, we randomly sampled pictures of scenes from small, medium, and large cities in Japan and the United States. ...

This paper describes the Sharp Intelligent Dictionary (SID), an English-Japanese glossing system for Japanese readers and learners of English. SID uses a variety of lightweight analysis techniques, a large bilingual dictionary and a prioritised model of collocations to present informed guesses about the best translations of words and expressions in their context.

We propose a method that learns a crosslingual projection of word representations from one language into another. Our method utilizes translatable context pairs as bonus terms of the objective function. In the experiments, our method outperformed existing methods in three language pairs, (English, Spanish), (Japanese, Chinese) and (English, Japanese), without using any additional supervisions.

This study examines the experiences of past and present members of a popular Japanese online dating site in order to explore the extent to which Western-based theories of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the development of online relationships are relevant to the Japanese online dating experience. Specifically, it examines whether social information processing theory (SIPT) is applicab...

This study was motivated by a hypothesis that mora-timed Japanese would show a stronger tendency to keep CV length equal than other languages, because CV must not be too long in Japanese where CV and CVC / CVV have a durational contrast. Thus from this hypothesis, the magnitude and preciseness of the temporal compensation effect is expected to be larger for Japanese than those for other languag...

We studied Japanese large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition (LV CSR) for a Japanese business newspaper. To enable word N-grams to be used, sentences were first segmented into words (morphemes) using a morphological analyzer. Newspaper articles for about five years were used to train Ngram language models. To evaluate our recognition system, we recorded speech data for sentences from anot...

As rapid social changes occur around the world, accompanied by increasingly larger numbers of elderly in need of care, it is crucial to gain new knowledge of the relationship between changing social institutions and the impact of such changes on the context in which care is given to the elderly. In Japan, the family has traditionally been the context in which caregiving occurs. Although family ...