Japanese News Research Articles

Proposal of an Information Compilation Method for Massive News Video Data Based on their Time-Series Semantic Structure

Recent increase of digital storage capacity has enabled the creation of large-scale on-line broadcast video archives. In order to make full use of the data in the archive, it is necessary to let a user easily grasp the availability of certain video data and their contents. Considering this problem, we have been investigating efficient and effective retrieval and reusing methodologies of archived video data. The archive used as a test-bed consists of more than 1,000 hours of news video obtained from a Japanese news program during the past six years. This paper first proposes a news topic tracking and structuring method. A structure called the `topic thread structure', is organized so that it should represent the temporal flow of news topics originating from a specified news story. The paper next introduces a browsing and editing interface that enables the user to browse through news stories along the topic thread structure, and also assists the compilation of selected news stories as a customized video summary or a documentary. The method was applied to the archived news video data in order to observe the quality of the topic thread structure and the usability of the prototype interface. As a result, some structures represented the flow of topics quite close to real-world comprehension. In addition, experiments showed that when the structure could be considered meaningful, the interface combined with the structure could drastically reduce the time needed to browse through the archive for news stories related to the user's interest.

Pro- and anti-whaling discourses in British and Japanese newspaper reports in comparison: a cross-cultural perspective

This article compares and contrasts the discourse of whaling in British and Japanese newspaper reports. It investigates the ways in which pro- and anti-whaling discourses are formulated in the press by examining, in particular, the following features: (1) the use of specific lexis and syntactic structures, (2) the use of rhetorical devices, and (3) the control and organization of information at a discourse level. The article claims that British and Japanese news reports use very different strategies in expressing their anti- and pro-whaling stances; the former tend to use a more emotive and provocative tone, whereas the latter use a more restrained and factual tone. The article also claims that the issue of whaling tends to be discussed under different cultural assumptions and values in the respective discourses; and thus, suggests the possibility that readers may be influenced by the cumulative effects of these different discourses.

Online Speech Detection and Dual-Gender Speech Recognition for Captioning Broadcast News

This paper describes a new method to detect speech segments online with identifying gender attributes for efficient dual gender-dependent speech recognition and broadcast news captioning. The proposed online speech detection performs dual-gender phoneme recognition and detects a start-point and an end-point based on the ratio between the cumulative phoneme likelihood and the cumulative non-speech likelihood with a very small delay from the audio input. Obtaining the speech segments, the phoneme recognizer also identifies gender attributes with high discrimination in order to guide the subsequent dual-gender continuous speech recognizer efficiently. As soon as the start-point is detected, the continuous speech recognizer with paralleled gender-dependent acoustic models starts a search and allows search transitions between male and female in a speech segment based on the gender attributes. Speech recognition experiments on conversational commentaries and field reporting from Japanese broadcast news showed that the proposed speech detection method was effective in reducing the false rejection rate from 4.6% to 0.53% and also recognition errors in comparison with a conventional method using adaptive energy thresholds. It was also effective in identifying the gender attributes, whose correct rate was 99.7% of words. With the new speech detection and the gender identification, the proposed dual-gender speech recognition significantly reduced the word error rate by 11.2% relative to a conventional gender-independent system, while keeping the computational cost feasible for real-time operation.

‘East is East, and West is West’: A Survey of EU Images in Japan’s Public Discourses

The world’s leading economy, the EU, is emerging as an influential political power on the world stage. In particular, the EU’s steady and profitable trade relations with Asia are being balanced increasingly with the growing political involvement of the EU in Asia. In this context, the EU’s relations with the most powerful players in the Asian region (Japan specifically) is of a paramount interest to the political practitioners and scholars. This paper aims to provide a systematic account for the perceptions and images of the EU existing in Japan’s public discourses of news media, national policy- and decision-makers, the business community and civil society. The reputable Japanese news media are found to portray the EU using neutral-to-positive assessments depicting it as a similarly thinking international partner, an important economic counterpart and a model to be critically considered for replication. Yet, the study argues a split in perceptions of the EU between Japan’s political and business elites on the one hand, and the general public and civil society sector on the other, with the EU consistently ‘slipping off the radars’ of the latter.

Word Error Rate Minimization Using an Integrated Confidence Measure

This paper describes a new criterion for speech recognition using an integrated confidence measure to minimize the word error rate (WER). The conventional criteria for WER minimization obtain the expected WER of a sentence hypothesis merely by comparing it with other hypotheses in an n-best list. The proposed criterion estimates the expected WER by using an integrated confidence measure with word posterior probabilities for a given acoustic input. The integrated confidence measure, which is implemented as a classifier based on maximum entropy (ME) modeling or support vector machines (SVMs), is used to acquire probabilities reflecting whether the word hypotheses are correct. The classifier is comprised of a variety of confidence measures and can deal with a temporal sequence of them to attain a more reliable confidence. Our proposed criterion for minimizing WER achieved a WER of 9.8% and a 3.9% reduction, relative to conventional n-best rescoring methods in transcribing Japanese broadcast news in various environments such as under noisy field and spontaneous speech conditions.

Mapping Frames in Japanese News

Mapping Frames in Japanese News

P-2 Content Analysis of Eating Disorders in Japanese News Paper(ISPOG2007)

P-2 Content Analysis of Eating Disorders in Japanese News Paper(ISPOG2007)

Media portrayal of the cultural relationship between Australia and Japan

This article traces Japanese and Australian media portrayals of the cultural aspects to the bilateral relationship. The article examines popular discourse about Japan and Australia in the media of each country, demonstrating how this has reflected the evolution of the cultural relationship. In Australia, the press has swung from portraying Japan as a problematic source of income from the resources trade, through to the home of ‘cool’ technology and fashion. In Japan, discourse about Australia has ranged from images of a country populated with cute animals, to a regional partner sharing the same democratic ideals. The article draws from the personal experiences of the author who was a correspondent and journalist for Australian and Japanese news corporations during the 1980s and 1990s. The author covered the ‘koala wars’ and the frill-necked lizard boom prompted by the Mitsubishi Mirage television commercial, as well as monitoring the growth in Japanese tourism to Australia. The author also draws on data from tracking surveys conducted by the Embassy of Japanese in Australia.

The Portrayals of Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior in Japanese News programs.

The Portrayals of Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior in Japanese News programs.

Korean–Japanese story link detection based on distributional and contrastive properties of event terms

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for multilingual story link detection. Our approach utilized the distributional features of terms in timelines and multilingual spaces, together with selected types of named entities in order to get distinctive weights for terms that constitute linguistic representation of events. On timelines term significance is calculated by comparing term distribution of the documents on a day with that of the total document collection. Since two languages can provide more information than one language, term significance is measured on each language space, which is then used as a bridge between two languages on multilingual spaces. Evaluating the method on Korean and Japanese news articles, our method achieved 14.3% improvement for monolingual story pairs, and 16.7% improvement for multilingual story pairs. By measuring the space density, the proposed weighting components are verified with a high density of the intra-event stories and a low density of the inter-events stories. This result indicates that the proposed method is helpful for multilingual story link detection.

사건 어휘의 특성을 반영한 다국어 사건 연결 탐색

In this paper, we propose a novel approach which models multilingual story link detection by adapting the features such as timelines and multilingual spaces as weighting components to give distinctive weights to terms related to events. On timelines term significance is calculated by comparing term distribution of the documents on that day with that on the total document collection reported, and used to represent the document vectors on that day. Since two languages can provide more information than one language, term significance is measured on each language space and used to refer the other language space as a bridge on multilingual spaces. Evaluating the method on Korean and Japanese news articles, our method achieved improvement for mono- and multi-lingual story pairs, and for multilingual story pairs, respectively. By measuring the space density, the proposed weighting components are verified with a high density of the intra-event stories and a low density of the inter-events stories. This result indicates that the proposed method is helpful for multilingual story link detection.

Politics, the media, and Korean language acquisition in Japan

This paper explores the impact that media coverage of current events has on the identity and language maintenance of language minorities by examining recent coverage of two major events related to the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea which were heavily covered by Japanese news media: the joint hosting of the 2002 soccer World Cup by Japan and South Korea during the early summer of 2002, and the admission by Kim Jong Il that North Korea had abducted a number of Japanese during the 1970s and 1980s. A small-scale survey of resident Koreans and interviews with the principals of three Korean schools in Kyoto as well as a teacher at one of these schools focused on the effects media reports of these events had on resident Koreans in Japan and the Korean language schools they maintain. Although the overall response to the survey was rather subdued, when it is considered together with the interviews with the school principals, the results give a glimpse of the strong impact media coverage can have on heritage language maintenance programs.

Reports on Philippine Industrial Crops in World War II from Japan's English Language Press

Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia placed enormous stocks ofthe region's industrial crops under Japanese control. English language Japanese news? paper reports from the Philippines suggest that the invaders grossly underutilized this vast storehouse of agricultural wealth. Washington's pre-war oil embargo severely crippled military and civilian transport services throughout the war, and Japan's conversion of cane sugar into fuel alcohol and butane for aviation fuel failed to generate successful outcomes. Also, as the Pacific War eliminated cotton imports from the United States, India, and Egypt, placing numerous Japanese textile factories in jeopardy, Tokyo attempted to replace Philippine cane sugar plantings that previously served US markets with raising raw cotton for Japanese textile interests. In the Philippines, how? ever, multifarious bottlenecks crippled all ofTokyo's wartime farm projects. Though the Japanese occupation was short-lived, it demonstrated Tokyo's intention to adjust the Philippine economy into a dependent relationship with Japanese industries.

Development of a Listening Strategy Intervention Program for Adult Learners of Japanese

The paper reports the results of Phase 2 of a study that investigates the listening comprehension strategies used by adult learners of Japanese. Phase 1 of the study identified the learners' listening strategies and categorised these strategies into a classification scheme and Phase 2 evaluated the efficacy of the listening-strategy intervention program. The listening-strategy classification scheme from Phase 1 provided the empirical basis for the Phase 2 instructional package of task-effective strategies for the intervention program. This paper reports the results of Phase 2 study. Members of the intervention group were taught to use three strategies ndash; ‘identifying key terms’, ‘elaborating’, and ‘inferencing’ ndash; to comprehend satellite Japanese news texts. The intervention program was administered during the course of teaching the intermediate-level Japanese course offered at a metropolitan university in Australia, where the data for the Phase 1 study were collected. Assessment of the intervention program's results indicated that the intervention group who received instruction on listening strategies achieved a higher level of comprehension than the non-intervention group. The implications of the study are discussed.

Understanding Digitized Second Language Videotext

Despite the widespread use of digital video and, increasingly, multimedia in listening instruction throughout second language programs, little is known about how learners attend to dynamic visual elements in comprehension. A lack of research in how listeners engage with videotext retards the development of computer-based listening skills. This investigation seeks to describe what learners do when they attend to digital video media. In conjunction with Japanese language instructors, three authentic Japanese news broadcasts were recorded and digitized for computer display. Through a series of immediately retrospective verbal reports, 12 tertiary students of Japanese provided verbal reports as they attended to a front-to-back viewing of videotexts. Based on constructivist perspectives of comprehension, the study produced a seven-category framework regarding the comprehension of second language videotexts. The results of this investigation point out that visual elements work in a number of ways that go beyond merely ‘supporting’ verbal elements; they are better thought of as integral resources to comprehension whose influence shifts from primary to secondary importance as a Hlistener develops a mature understanding of the videotext.

Sequential Estimation With Optimal Forgettingfor Robust Speech Recognition

Mismatch is known to degrade the performance of speech recognition systems. In real life applications we often encounter nonstationary mismatch sources. A general way to compensate for slowly time varying mismatch is by using sequential algorithms with forgetting. The choice of the forgetting factor is usually performed empirically on some development data, and no optimality criterion is used. In this paper we introduce a framework for obtaining optimal forgetting factor. In sequential algorithms, a recursion is usually used to calculate the required parameters so as to optimize a certain performance measure. To obtain optimal forgetting, we develop a recursion to calculate the forgetting factor that optimizes the same performance criterion as done in the original recursion. When combined together the two recursions result in a sequential algorithm that simultaneously optimizes the desired parameters and the forgetting factor. The proposed method is applied in conjunction with a sequential noise estimation algorithm, but the same principle can be extended to a wide range of sequential algorithms. The algorithm is extensively evaluated for different speech recognition tasks: the 5K Wall Street Journal task corrupted by different types of artificially added noise, a command and digit database recorded in a noisy car environment, and a 20K Japanese broadcast news task corrupted by field noise. In all situations it was found that the sequential algorithm performs as well as or better than batch estimation. In addition, the proposed optimal forgetting algorithm performs as well as the best hand tuned forgetting factor. This results in a continuously adaptive compensation technique without the need of any manual adjustment.

A new approach to automatic speech summarization

This paper proposes a new automatic speech summarization method. In this method, a set of words maximizing a summarization score is extracted from automatically transcribed speech. This extraction is performed according to a target compression ratio using a dynamic programming (DP) technique. The extracted set of words is then connected to build a summarization sentence. The summarization score consists of a word significance measure, a confidence measure, linguistic likelihood, and a word concatenation probability. The word concatenation score is determined by a dependency structure in the original speech given by stochastic dependency context free grammar (SDCFG). Japanese broadcast news speech transcribed using a large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition (LVCSR) system is summarized using our proposed method and compared with manual summarization by human subjects. The manual summarization results are combined to build a word network. This word network is used to calculate the word accuracy of each automatic summarization result using the most similar word string in the network. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively extracts relatively important information by removing redundant and irrelevant information.

Turn-taking in English and Japanese: Projectability in Grammar, Intonation, and Semantics

Acknowledgments Dedication Table of Contents List of Charts, Figures, and Tables Transcription Conventions and Abbreviations 1: Introduction 2: Literature Review 3: Turn-taking in English Conversation 4: Turn-taking in Japanese Conversation 5: Turn-taking in U.S. Political News Interviews 6: Turn-taking in Japanese Political News Interviews 7: Completion Points 8: Speaker Changes 9: Completion Points and Speaker Changes 10: Turn-taking in English and Japanese 11: Conversation and Political News Interviews 12: Conclusion References

Functions of Deictics and Eye Movements in Japanese Sign News

Functions of Deictics and Eye Movements in Japanese Sign News

Application trials for the realization of human-friendly broadcasting

This paper describes some application systems developed to present human-friendly broadcasting services for the elderly, who at times have difficulty following rapid speech, and for the hearing impaired. These systems include a real-time speech rate converter for the former and a real-time transcription system for the simultaneous subtitling of Japanese broadcast news programs for the latter. In the conversion system the listener can change the speech rate at any time. The pitch of the converted speech is the same as that of the original speech, and its quality suffers little or no impairment. The results of listening tests by elderly observers show that the converted speech, with a slower speech rate than normal, is perceptually preferred. The other system is based on a unique continuous speech recognition system developed by our group. It has been successfully applied to two actual NHK news programs since March 2000.