Japanese Web Research Articles

Japanese WEB Business Startups

Japanese WEB Business Startups

Automatic linguistic knowledge acquisition for the web

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem in natural language processing by introducing a new rule‐based approach for the automatic acquisition of linguistic knowledge.Design/methodology/approachThe author has developed a new machine translation methodology that only requires a bilingual lexicon and a parallel corpus of surface sentences aligned at the sentence level to learn new transfer rules.FindingsA first prototype of a web‐based Japanese‐English translation system called Japanese‐English translation using corpus‐based acquisition of transfer (JETCAT) has been implemented in SWI‐Prolog, and a Greasemonkey user script to analyze Japanese web pages and translate sentences via Ajax. In addition, linguistic information is displayed at the character, word, and sentence level to provide a useful tool for web‐based language learning. An important feature is customization; the user can simply correct translation results leading to an incremental update of the knowledge base.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper focuses on the technical aspects and user interface issues of JETCAT. The author is planning to use JETCAT in a classroom setting to gather first experiences and will then evaluate a real‐world deployment; also work has started on extending JETCAT to include collaborative features.Practical implicationsThe research has a high practical impact on academic language education. It also could have implications for the translation industry by superseding certain translation tasks and, on the other hand, adding value and quality to others.Originality/valueThe paper presents an extended version of the paper receiving the Emerald Web Information Systems Best Paper Award at iiWAS2010.

A Study of Link Farm Evolution Using a Time-series of Web Snapshots

Web spamming has emerged to deceive search engines and obtain a higher ranking in search result lists which brings more traffic and profits to web sites. Link farm is one of the major spamming techniques, which creates a large set of densely inter-linked spam pages to deceive link-based ranking algorithms that regard incoming links to a page as endorsements to it. Those link farms need to be eliminated when we are searching, analyzing and mining the Web, but they are also interesting social activities in the cyberspace. Our purpose is to understand dynamics of link farms, such as, how much they are growing or shrinking, and how their topics change over time. Such information is helpful in developing new spam detection techniques and tracking spam sites for observing their topics. Especially, we are interested in where we can find emerging spam sites that is useful for updating spam classifiers. In this paper, we study overall size/topic distribution and evolution of link farms in large-scale Japanese web archives for three years containing four million hosts and 83 million links. As far as we know, the overall characteristics of link farms in a time-series of web snapshots of this scale have never been explored. We propose a method for extracting link farms and investigate their size distribution and topics. We observe the evolution of link farms from the perspective of size growth and change in topic distribution. We recursively decomposed host graphs into link farms and found that from 4% to 7% of hosts were members of link farms. This implies we can remove quite a number of spam hosts without contents analysis. We also found the two dominant topics, “Adult” and “Travel”, accounted for over 60% of spam hosts in link farms. The size evolution of link farms showed that many link farms maintained for years, but most of them did not grow. The distribution of topics in link farms was not significantly changed, but hosts and keywords related to each topic dynamically changed. These results suggest that we can observe topic changes in each link farm, but we cannot efficiently find emerging spam sites by monitoring link farms. This implies that to detect newly created spam sites, monitoring current link farm is not enough. Detecting sites that generate links to spam sites would be an effective approach.

Automatic Extraction and Evaluation of Human Activity Using Conditional Random Fields and Self-Supervised Learning

In our definition, human activity can be expressed by five basic attributes: actor, action, object, time and location. The goal of this paper is describe a method to automatically extract all of the basic attributes and the transition between activities derived from sentences in Japanese web pages. However, previous work had some limitations, such as high setup costs, inability to extract all attributes, limitation on the types of sentences that can be handled, and insufficient consideration interdependency among attributes. To resolve these problems, this paper proposes a novel approach that uses conditional random fields and self-supervised learning. Given a small corpus sample as input, it automatically makes its own training data and a feature model. Based on the feature model, it automatically extracts all of the attributes and the transition between the activities in each sentence retrieved from the Web corpus. This approach treats activity extraction as a sequence labeling problem, and has advantages such as domain-independence, scalability, and does not require any human input. Since it is unnecessary to fix the number of elements in a tuple, this approach can extract all of the basic attributes and the transition between activities by making only a single pass. Additionally, by converting to simpler sentences, the approach can deal with complex sentences retrieved from the Web. In an experiment, this approach achieves high precision (activity: 88.9%, attributes: over 90%, transition: 87.5%).

Detecting Hijacked Sites by Web Spammer Using Link-Based Algorithms

In this paper, we propose a method for finding web sites whose links are hijacked by web spammers. A hijacked site is a trustworthy site that points to untrustworthy sites. To detect hijacked sites, we evaluate the trustworthiness of web sites, and examine how trustworthy sites are hijacked by untrustworthy sites in their out-neighbors. The trustworthiness is evaluated based on the difference between the white and spam scores that calculated by two modified versions of PageRank. We define two hijacked scores that measure how likely a trustworthy site is to be hijacked based on the distribution of the trustworthiness in its out-neighbors. The performance of those hijacked scores are compared using our large-scale Japanese Web archive. The results show that a better performance is obtained by the score that considers both trustworthy and untrustworthy out-neighbors, compared with the one that only considers untrustworthy out-neighbors.

Finding Related Search Engine Queries by Web Community Based Query Enrichment

The conventional approaches of finding related search engine queries rely on the common terms shared by two queries to measure their relatedness. However, search engine queries are usually short and the term overlap between two queries is very small. Using query terms as a feature space cannot accurately estimate relatedness. Alternative feature spaces are needed to enrich the term based search queries. In this paper, given a search query, first we extract the Web pages accessed by users from Japanese Web access logs which store the users individual and collective behavior. From these accessed Web pages we usually can get two kinds of feature spaces, i.e, content-sensitive (e.g., nouns) and content-ignorant (e.g., URLs), to enrich the expressions of search queries. Then, the relatedness between search queries can be estimated on their enriched expressions. Our experimental results show that the URL feature space produces much lower precision scores than the noun feature space which, however, is not applicable in non-text pages, dynamic pages and so on. It is crucial to improve the quality of the URL (content-ignorant) feature space since it is generally available in all types of Web pages. We propose a novel content-ignorant feature space, called Web community which is created from a Japanese Web page archive by exploiting link analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed Web community feature space generates much better results than the URL feature space.

Stable isotope-guided analysis of congener-specific PCB concentrations in a Japanese coastal food web

Organisms collected from a coastal ecosystem in Japan were analyzed for concentrations of 205 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) congeners; analyses were guided by δ13C and δ15N measurements. The regression slopes of log PCB concentration on δ15N value are regarded as indices of biomagnification in food webs. The slope (wet weight basis) of ΣPCBs was +0.104; the slope (lipid weight basis) was close to zero. Lipid content increased from 0.06% in a primary producer to 8.32% in the highest trophic level consumer. Hence, biomagnification of ΣPCBs (wet weight basis) can be attributed to increase of lipid content through the food web. For most of the congeners, the slopes (wet weight basis) exceeded those (lipid weight basis) by ca. 0.10. Slopes increased with increasing PCB chlorination levels between chlorine numbers 1–6; slopes decreased at higher chlorination levels. This decrease is likely caused by a decrease in membrane permeability with increasing molecular weight.

Query structuring and expansion with two-stage term dependence for Japanese web retrieval

In this paper, we propose a new term dependence model for information retrieval, which is based on a theoretical framework using Markov random fields. We assume two types of dependencies of terms given in a query: (i) long-range dependencies that may appear for instance within a passage or a sentence in a target document, and (ii) short-range dependencies that may appear for instance within a compound word in a target document. Based on this assumption, our two-stage term dependence model captures both long-range and short-range term dependencies differently, when more than one compound word appear in a query. We also investigate how query structuring with term dependence can improve the performance of query expansion using a relevance model. The relevance model is constructed using the retrieval results of the structured query with term dependence to expand the query. We show that our term dependence model works well, particularly when using query structuring with compound words, through experiments using a 100-gigabyte test collection of web documents mostly written in Japanese. We also show that the performance of the relevance model can be significantly improved by using the structured query with our term dependence model.

A Web Corpus and Word Sketches for Japanese

Of all the major world languages, Japanese is lagging behind in terms of publicly accessible and searchable corpora. In this paper we describe the development of JpWaC (Japanese Web as Corpus), a large corpus of 400 million words of Japanese web text, and its encoding for the Sketch Engine. The Sketch Engine is a web-based corpus query tool that supports fast concordancing, grammatical processing, ‘word sketching’ (one-page summaries of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour), a distributional thesaurus, and robot use. We describe the steps taken to gather and process the corpus and to establish its validity, in terms of the kinds of language it contains. We then describe the development of a shallow grammar for Japanese to enable word sketching. We believe that the Japanese web corpus as loaded into the Sketch Engine will be a useful resource for a wide number of Japanese researchers, learners, and NLP developers.

日本語ウェブページに出現するムードの収集，および拡充したムード体系の提案

日本語ウェブページに出現するムードの収集，および拡充したムード体系の提案

Automatically generating related queries in Japanese

Web searchers reformulate their queries, as they adapt to search engine behavior, learn more about a topic, or simply correct typing errors. Automatic query rewriting can help user web search, by augmenting a user’s query, or replacing the query with one likely to retrieve better results. One example of query-rewriting is spell-correction. We may also be interested in changing words to synonyms or other related terms. For Japanese, the opportunities for improving results are greater than for languages with a single character set, since documents may be written in multiple character sets, and a user may express the same meaning using different character sets. We give a description of the characteristics of Japanese search query logs and manual query reformulations carried out by Japanese web searchers. We use characteristics of Japanese query reformulations to extend previous work on automatic query rewriting in English, taking into account the Japanese writing system. We introduce several new features for building models resulting from this difference and discuss their impact on automatic query rewriting. We also examine enhancements in the form of rules which block conversion between some character sets, to address Japanese homophones. The precision/recall curves show significant improvement with the new feature set and blocking rules, and are often better than the English counterpart.

ゲノム解析ツールリンク集

ゲノム解析ツールリンク集

Localization of Web design: An empirical comparison of German, Japanese, and United States Web site characteristics

AbstractTo explore issues of user interface design and experience, including culturally preferred design elements, a study was conducted analyzing sites in Germany, Japan, and the United States (30 municipal sites in each country). Design elements considered are use of symbols and graphics, color preferences, site features (links, maps, search functions, and page layout), language, and content. Significant modal differences were found in each of the listed categories. Outcomes from the study are used to discuss future research directions in the areas of experience design and localization.

Beyond the Net

This study examines the individualism-collectivism dimension reflected in Japanese multinationals' web communication, hypothesizing that the firms tend to adopt a “value paradox” strategy to stimulate consumers' hidden needs. After developing an original typology consisting of 20 cultural values, a content analysis of 150 product-based websites was conducted in Japan, Spain and the U.S. The comparison was made between websites created for the home country market and those created by the same firms for the host country markets. The findings reveal that Japanese multinationals are likely to employ more individualist values in websites created for the Japanese and Spanish markets, while emphasizing collectivist values in those created for the U.S. market. Further, individualist values are more accentuated in verbal cues than in non-verbal cues in the Japanese market sample. The authors conclude that Japanese firms tend to use opposing values in web-based product presentations so as to capture more consumers' attention. Managerial implications and limitations are then discussed.

Language Policy in South Korea and the Special Case of Japanese

Abstract. At the beginning of the 21st century, South Koreans have embraced foreign languages with almost unbridled enthusiasm. Most of the enthusiasm is directed toward English of course but, for both economic and cultural reasons, Japanese also looms large. Moreover, the decision by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in October 1998 to open up the country to Japanese popular culture has increased the appetite for the Japanese language, especially among the young. Koreans now study Japanese again; they access Japanese Web sites; they travel to Japan. Yet Koreans' enthusiasm for Japanese is qualitatively different from their appetite for English. Japanese may be learned, but it is to be kept out of the Korean language itself. English loans may be adopted "out of necessity," but not Japanese. The South Korean policy of linguistic purism is aimed explicitly at Japanese, and numerous books, manuals, and pamphlets instruct the public on how to recognize and purge Japanese influences from their speech and writing. Newspapers and other media wage periodic campaigns to do the same. The Korean public generally supports and cooperates with these policies and campaigns, which, for the most part, are surprisingly effective. There are numerous problems with Korean linguistic purism, however, and prescriptive intervention in the Korean language by government and media requires a continued investment of research, resources, and public support. How successful these efforts will be in the face of ever-closer ties with Japan remains to be seen.

Review of Japanese Web sites for Chinese history

In the study of Chinese history, Japan is the most important place of such studies outside China. This paper sets out to introduce Japanese Web sites on Chinese history and briefly discuss the characteristics of such Web sites. The Web sites on Chinese history that were developed by Japanese scholars contain highly specialized contents, including from research associations on a particular dynasty to organizations on a particular subject.

Financial reporting on the Internet by leading Japanese companies

Financial reporting on the Internet is an activity that has increased in recent years. This paper reports the results of a survey of Internet reporting by the top 99 Japanese companies in 1998. It was found that the majority of these companies (78) had a Web site in English and that of these 68 reported some financial information with 57 providing detailed accounting information. Company size was significantly positively associated with the existence of a Web site but the extent of financial disclosure did not appear to be related to size. There was no significant association between profitability, industry grouping and overseas listing status and Internet disclosure. The survey was updated in 2001 by re‐evaluating those companies which had no Web site or only a Japanese Web site in 1998. It was found that the majority of these companies now have an English language Web site with full annual reports available.

Measuring cultural adaptation on the Web: a content analytic study of U.S. and Japanese Web sites

Web sites reach global audiences by nature, and as such necessitate country-specific cultural adaptation. The paper proposes a framework to measure cultural values embedded in Web sites and tests it using a content analysis of U.S. and Japanese company Web sites. The results provide evidence that country-specific Web sites reflect national cultural values. The proposed framework can serve as a guide for developing culturally congruent Web sites.