Current trend in telecommunications is "broadband" and "ubiquitous." To achieve this goal, satellite communications systems are expected to play an important role in cooperation with terrestrial communications systems. Along with the advancement of optical fiber transmission systems, the role of satellite communications was dramatically changed from long distance transmission to various applications utilizing unique features of satellite communications. This paper overviews recent Japanese R&D in satellite communications.

This paper describes a method for recognizing romanized Japanese words in learner English. They become noise and problematic in a variety of systems and tools for language learning and teaching including text analysis, spell checking, and grammatical error detection because they are Japanese words and thus mostly unknown to such systems and tools. A problem one encounters when recognizing romanized Japanese words in learner English is that the spelling rules of romanized Japanese words are often violated. To address this problem, the described method uses a clustering algorithm reinforced by a small set of rules. Experiments show that it achieves an F-measure of 0.879 and outperforms other methods. They also show that it only requires the target text and an English word list of reasonable size.

We recorded time series data of calls of Japanese tree frogs (Hyla japonica; Nihon-Ama-Gaeru) and examined the dynamics of the experimentally observed data not only through linear time series analysis such as power spectra but also through nonlinear time series analysis such as reconstruction of orbits with delay coordinates and different kinds of recurrence plots, namely the conventional recurrence plot (RP), the iso-directional recurrence plot (IDRP), and the iso-directional neighbors plot (IDNP). The results show that a single frog called nearly periodically, and a pair of frogs called nearly periodically but alternately in almost anti-phase synchronization with little overlap through mutual interaction. The fundamental frequency of the calls of a single frog during the interactive calling between two frogs was smaller than when the same frog first called alone. We also used the recurrence plots to study nonlinear and nonstationary determinism in the transition of the calling behavior. Moreover, we quantified the determinism of the nonlinear and nonstationary dynamics with indices of the ratio R of the number of points in IDNP to that in RP and the percentage PD of contiguous points forming diagonal lines in RP by the recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). Finally, we discuss a possibility of mathematical modeling of the calling behavior and a possible biological meaning of the call alternation.

In this paper, we propose a statistical model for detecting article errors, which Japanese learners of English often make in English writing. It is based on the three head words--the verb head, the preposition, and the noun head. To overcome the data sparseness problem, we apply the backed-off estimate to it. Experiments show that its performance (F-measure=0.70) is better than that of other methods. Apart from the performance, it has two advantages: (i) Rules for detecting article errors are automatically generated as conditional probabilities once a corpus is given; (ii) Its recall and precision rates are adjustable.

In Japanese, there is frequent alternation between CV morae and moraic geminate consonants. In this study, we analyzed the phonemic environments of consonant gemination (CG) using the "Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ)." The results revealed that the environment in which gemination occurs is, to some extent, parallel to that of vowel devoicing. However, there are two crucial differences. One difference is that the CG tends to occur in a /kVk/ environment, whereas such is not the case for vowel devoicing. The second difference is that when the preceding consonant is /r/, gemination occurs, but not vowel devoicing. These observations suggest that the mechanism leading to CG differs from that which leads to vowel devoicing.

Spontaneously spoken Japanese includes a lot of grammatically ill-formed linguistic phenomena such as fillers, hesitations, inversions, and so on, which do not appear in written language. This paper proposes a novel method of robust dependency parsing using a large-scale spoken language corpus, and evaluates the availability and robustness of the method using spontaneously spoken dialogue sentences. By utilizing stochastic information about the appearance of ill-formed phenomena, the method can robustly parse spoken Japanese including fillers, inversions, or dependencies over utterance units. Experimental results reveal that the parsing accuracy reached 87.0%, and we confirmed that it is effective to utilize the location information of a bunsetsu, and the distance information between bunsetsus as stochastic information.

Described here is an automatic text summarization system for Japanese newspaper articles on sassho-jiken (murders and bodily harms). We extract the pieces of information from a text, inter-connect them to represent the scenes and participants involved in the sassho-jiken, and finally produce a summary by generating sentences from the information extracted. An experiment and its evaluation show that, while a limitation being imposed on the domain, our method works well in depicting important information from the newspaper articles and the summaries produced are better in adequacy and readability than those obtained by extracting sentences.

Since spontaneously spoken language expressions appear continuously, the transfer stage of a spoken language machine translation system have to work incrementally. In such the system, the high degree of incrementality is also strongly required rather than that of quality. This paper proposes an incremental machine translation system, which translates English spoken words into Japanese in accordance with the order of appearances of them. The system is composed of three modules: incremental parsing, transfer and generation, which work synchronously. The transfer module utilizes some features and phenomena characterizing Japanese spoken language: flexible wordorder, ellipses, repetitions and so forth. This in influenced by the observational facts that such characteristics frequently appear in Japanese uttered by English-Japanese interpreters. Their frequent utilization is the key to success of the exceedingly incremental translation between English and Japanese, which have different word-order. We have implemented a prototype system Sync/Trans, which parses English dialogues incrementally and generates Japanese immediately. To evaluate Sync/Trans we fave made an experiment with the conversations consisting of 27 dialogues and 218 sentences. 190 of the sentences are correct, providing a success rate of 87.2%. This result shows our incremental method to be a promising technique for spoken language translation with acceptable accuracy and high real-time nature.

Fundamental microwave key devices used in achieving compact mobile/portable telephones (raidio units) are discussed. The historical development flow of the systems and radio units are introduced, with respect to the 800-/900-MHz and 1.5-GHz Japanese cellular radio systems. The design concept of the developed radio units is briefly described. Tehnical requirements for RF circuits are reviewed and the developed key devices are practically applied to the circuits. Key factors in the requirements are also shown. Finally. future trends fro the key devices are surveyed from the stand point of achieving a smaller and more light weight pocket radio unit.

We are aming to develop a computer-based consultant system which helps novice computer users to achieve their task goals on computers through natural language dialogues. Our target is spoken Japanese. To develop effective methods for processing spoken Japanese, it is essential to analyze real dialogues and to find the characteristics of spoken Japanese. In this paper, we discuss the design problems associated with constructing a spoken dialogue database from the viewpoint of advisory dialogue collection, describe XMH (X-window-based electronic mail handling program) usage experiments made to collect advisory dialogues between novice XMH users and an expert consultant, and show the dialogue database we constructed from these dialogues. The main features of our database are as follows: (1) Our target dialogues were advisory ones. (2) The advisory dialogues were all related to the use of XMH that has a visual interface operated by a keyboard and a mouse. (3) The primary objective of the users was not to engage in dialogues but to achieve specific task goals using XMH. (4) Not only what the users said but also XMH operations performed by the users are included as dialogue elements. This kind of dialogue database is a very effective source for developing new methods for processing spoken language in multimodal consultant systems, and we have therefore made it available to the public. Based on our analysis of the database, we have already developed several effective methods such as a method for recognizing user's communicative intention from a transcript of spoken Japanese, and a method for controlling dialogues between a novice XMH user and the computer-based consultant system which we are developing. Also, we have proposed several response generation rules as the response strategy for the consultant system. We have developed an experimental consultant system by implementing the above methods and strategy.

An automatic zip code recognition system for Japanese mail is proposed in this paper. It is assumed that a zip code is composed of three numerals and requited to be written in a specified frame. In actual images, however, the three numerals sometimes extend outside the specified frame and are not clearly separated. Considering this situation, the authors devised a system with two stages, the segmentation stage and the recognition stage. The segmentation stage consists of five steps: setting and adjusting of initial areas for numeral images (figures), calculation of the center of gravity of each figure, search for the horizontal and vertical boundaries of each figure, determination of the final area for each figure, and normalization of the figure in each final area. In the recognition stage, the Localized Arc Pattern Method (Arc method) proposed by Yoshimura et al. (1991) is implemented hierarchically; that is, a simple Arc method is applied first to each figure and a more complex one is applied subsequently unless the figure is identified in the first step. In the recognition process, every figure is judged as a numeral or otherwise rejected. The proposed system was applied to a database provided by the Institute for Post and Telecommunications Policy (IPTP). The segmentation algorithm yielded an adequate result. The recognition algorithm yielded scores as high as 90.6% in correct recognition rate and 0.7% in error rate. The best score of the precision index (P-index) specified by the IPTP was as low as 15.7 for the above mentioned IPTP database, while the score for another IPTP database was 16.9.

An integrated pen interface system was developed to allow effective Japanese text entry. It consists of sub-systems for handwriting recognition, contextual post-processing, and enhanced Kana-to-Kanji conversion. The recognition sub-system uses a hybrid algorithm consisting of a pattern matcher and a neural network discriminator. Special care was taken to improve the recognition of non-Kanji and simple Kanji characters frequently used in fast data entry. The post-processor predicts consecutive characters on the basis of bigrams modified by the addition of parts of speech and substitution of macro characters for Kanji characters. A Kana-to Kanji conversion method designed for ease of use with a pen interface has also been integrated into the system. In an experiment in which 2,900 samples of Kanji and non-Kanji characters were obtained from 20 subjects, it was observed that the original recognition accuracy of 83.7% (the result obtained by using the pattern matching recognizer) was improved to 90.7% by adding the neural network discriminator, and that it was further improved to 94.4% by adding the post-processor. The improved recognition accuracy for non-Kanji characters was particularly marked.

This paper surveys the researches on biological and electeromagnetic environments in RF (radio frequency) and microwave regions in Japan. Publicized research reports on biological objectives, evaluation of exposure rate, electromagnetic environments and guideline for the protection from radio wave nuisances are briefly introduced. Some researches on the evaluation of the exposure rate caused by the near field effect of portable radio transceiver are reviewed. Radio frequency exposer protection guidelines in Japan are also described.

This paper proposes an off-line text-independent writer identification method applicable to Japanese and Korean sentences. It is assumed that the writer of a writing in question exists in a certain group of people and that reference writings written by each person in the group can be used for identification. In the proposed method, relative frequencies of some model patterns are counted on the binary pattern of each writing and are used as the feature to measure the distance between two writings. Based on a modified Mahalanobis' distance for this feature, the person whose reference writing is nearest to the writing in question is judged as the writer. The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined through an experiment using Japanese and Korean writings. Error rates in the experiment were different depending on conditions such as volume of reference writings, dimension of adopted features, and number of people to be identified. In some cases, error rates as low as 0% were observed. Error rates tend to be lower in Korean writings probably because Hangul is composed of a smaller number of letters compared to Kanji and Hiragana in Japanese writing.

A unification-based Japanese parser has been implemented for an experimental Japanese-to-English spoken language translation system (SL-TRANS). The parser consists of a unification-based spoken-style Japanese grammar and an active chart parser. The grammar handles the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic constraints in an integrated fashion using HPSG-based framework in order to cope with speech recognition errors. The parser takes multiple sentential candidates from the HMM-LR speech recognizer, and produces a semantic representation associated with the best scoring parse based on acoustic and linguistic plausibility. The unification-based parser has been tested using 12 dialogues in the conference registration domain, which include 261 sentences uttered by one male speaker. The sentence recognition accuracy of the underlying speech recognizer is 73.6% for the top candidate, and 83.5% for the top three candidates, where the test-set perplexity of the CFG grammar is 65. By ruling out erroneous speech recognition results using various linguistic constraints, the parser improves the sentence recognition accuracy up to 81.6% for the top candidate, and 85.8% for the top three candidates. From the experiment result, we found that the combination of syntactic restriction, selectional restriction and coordinate structure restriction can provide a sufficient restriction to rule out the recognition errors between case-marking particles with the same vowel, which are the type of errors most likely to occur. However, we also found that it is necessary to use pragmatic information, such as topic, presupposition, and discourse structure, to rule out the recognition errors involved with topicalizing particles and sentence final particles.

This paper surveys the developments and achievements of teletraffic studies in Japan. It briefly covers the period preceding 1970, then focuses on the period after 1970. Rather than attempting to cover the entire field of teletraffic engineering, it places its emphasis on basic models.