International Journal of Computer Processing of Languages

This work designs, develops and implements a virtual laboratory for digital circuit design in Macro Universities that can create a rich learning environment for students from all over the world. Our system consists of four parts: agent execution environments, mobile agents, wrapper agents and experimental platforms. Mobile agents are received and executed in the agent execution environment, which provides locations and other resources for the mobile agents. The wrapper agent acts as a middleware for the mobile agent and the experimental platform. The experimental platform is an existing application program that could be a learning program, such as a CAI tool or a design tool, such as a CAD system. The major merit of our system is that it enables network capability for a standalone program without the need for the source code of the original program. The prototype of our virtual laboratory is targeted at a digital circuit laboratory. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

In Japan, most of the real time distance learning systems constructed over JGN (Japan Gigabit Network) are simple applications of video conference system equipped with high-quality audio/video transmission equipment. Such systems are not modeled to add distance educational support such as real time floor control, and are insufficient and inefficient to perform real time distance lecture or seminar when the number of sites get larger. This paper proposes a Working Model for distributed computer systems supporting real-time interactive distance lectures or seminars over JGN. As an application of the working model, functions for floor control and tele-presentation were discussed. The utility of the proposed working model was confirmed with an experimental system.

As Internet usage becomes more popular over the world, e-learning system, e.g., online learning, employee training courses, e-books, etc. has been accepted globally. How to provide the optimum content for individualized learning becomes an important issue for e-learning system. In this work, a Computer-Assisted Learning Expert System (CAL-ES), based upon expert system methodology, is proposed to provide individualized teaching materials for learners in accordance with their learning aptitudes and evaluation results. According to the cycle of knowledge management in CAL system, which is similar to the cycle of general knowledge management, four mechanisms, i.e. Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Acquisition, Knowledge Organizer, and Knowledge Miner, are designed in CAL-ES. The Object Oriented Course Model (OOCM) is used as the presentation of knowledge in designing CAL system, and is used in CAL-ES. Knowledge Acquisition technology is applied to acquire knowledge from experts, including the knowledge for constructing Teaching Object, building Teaching Materials, and managing Teaching Resources. Knowledge Organizer is a directory service for efficiently managing teaching resources. Finally, Knowledge Miner is used to find implicit knowledge from historical records of the system using Data Mining technologies. These four mechanisms in CAL-ES provide complete knowledge system capability for a CAL system. In the last three years, we have been working on building an integrated CAL platform in the Virtual Mathematical High School project, and the prototype of CAL-ES will be introduced in this work.

This paper presents a new extraction pattern, called a modified Document Type Definition (mDTD), which relies on an analytical interpretation method to identify textual fragments of documents from the Web. We make two major modifications which differ from the conventional DTD. Regarding syntax, we introduced an extended content model with more operators and keywords. For the semantics, we changed the way to interpret the mDTD rules. The mDTD can represent HTML structures and extraction targets. The design goal of mDTD is to overcome major barriers with information extraction, such as domain portability with minimum human intervention while maintaining a high extraction performance. The user composes mDTD as seed rules from which our system extracts instances from structured documents on the Web. These extracted instances are used as inputs to SmL (Sequential mDTD Learner). SmL generates new mDTD rules that are based on the part-of-speech (POS) tag and the lexical similarity features. For learning, a hand-tagged corpus is not required. We experimented with 200 Web documents on audio and video shopping sites. The results show 91.3% average extraction precision.

Due to grammatical similarities, even a one-to-one mapping between Korean and Japanese words (or morphemes) can usually result in a high quality Korean-to-Japanese machine translation. However, multi-word translation units (MWTU), such as idioms, compound words, etc., require n-to-m mapping. Often, the component words of such units do not appear adjacently, which results in a discontinuous MWTU. During translation, the MWTU should be treated as one lexical item rather than as a phrase. In this paper, we investigate units which should be treated as MWTUs in a Korean-to-Japanese MT system, examine discontinuity between their component morphemes, and propose a representation and recognition method, depending on their characteristics. In an experimental evaluation, the proposed method is very effective for handling MWTUs, showing high recall and precision of 99.8% and 99.5% and a fast recognition time.

A considerable amount of calligraphy has been accumulated from past Chinese dynasties. With the arrival of the digital era, this calligraphy is being digitalized. However, when digital representations of the calligraphy are transmitted over a noisy channel, transmission errors usually occur. In this paper, we propose a new error prevention and concealment method for Chinese calligraphy. The basic idea of the method is to extract the image feature from a Chinese calligraphy and use it as the auxiliary information. Next, the auxiliary information is embedded into the BTC-compressed codes of the original image. Therefore, the auxiliary information can be extracted to help with the reconstruction of the errant blocks during the error concealment phase. From our experimental results, the proposed scheme can effectively conceal the errant blocks. Moreover, when comparing our method with related research, the image quality of our proposed method is superior to those of PIR and GSBEC. The superiority is more outstanding when the errant blocks are larger. Therefore, our proposed method is a highly effective error concealment technique for Chinese calligraphy.