Distance Learning and the Internet Conference 2008

125

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

5-4

Asia Broadband Experiment on Ontology-based Search Engine

Eiichi Chiba1, Kentaro Ogura2, Wataru Kameyama3, Michiko Nakano4, Yusuke Kodo5, Eichiro Tsutsui6

1NTT Communications, 2NTT Software, 3GITS, Waseda University, 4Faculty of Education and Integrated Arts and Sciences, Waseda University,

5Ritsumeikan University, 6Hiroshima International University

nakanom@waseda.jp

AbstractMinistry of Internal Affairs and Communication in

Japan had funded Asia Broadband Experiments in 2005, 2006 and 2007 for the purpose of ensuring the educational values in expanding broadband connec-tions between Thailand and Japan. GITS and Distance Learning Center at Waseda University participated in the cyber experiments by offering cyber courses to Chulalongkorn Univeristy in the past three years. NTT Communications and NTT Software provided the necessary equipments and ascertained the cyber connections between the two universities. It has been noted by the two parties that the cyber lectures and discussion were useful educational tools in the 21st Century; wherever you were, you would receive high quality education, once the network connections were established. In this presentation, we would like to report Ontology-based search engines and its useful-ness and feasibility. NTT Communications and NTT Software developed bilingual lexicon and generative dictionary content in addition to multi-pass search engine.

KeywordsBroadband Networking, Cyber Seminars,

Ontology-based search engine, Video-conferencing discussion

IntroductionMulti- point Cyber Seminars have been in opera-

tion at Waseda University since 2003. First Cyber Seminar entitled as “Co-existence in Asia” was con-ducted by Professor Kinoshita and Nakano, involving five Universities in Asia: Fudan University in China, Korea University, Korea, Thammasat University in Thailand, National University of Singapore, Singapore and Waseda University. “World Englishes and Miscommunications” started in 2004 and we managed to recruit nine universities in Asia: Korea University, Hankang University and Namseoul

University in Korea, De La Salle University, P h i l i p p i n e s , F u d a n U n i v e r s i t y i n C h i n a , Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, National University of Singapore, Deli University in India, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Wenzao Usulite College of Foreign Languages in Taiwan. Cyber course, “Free Trade Agreements in Asia” by Dr Terada also recruit four universities: Fudan University in China, Korea University, Korea, Thammasat University in Thailand, National University of Singapore, Singapore and Waseda University. These multi-point distance learning seminars are combined with on-demand lectures. The participants are required to study on-demand lectures, and to ask questions on BBS to clarify their comprehension of the lecture contents.

In comparison with the one-to-one distance learn-ing seminar such as “Towards Establishing East Asian Union” by Dr Urata, the multi-point distance learning seminars have some demerits. First, it is difficult to find the suitable time slots which are convenient to all the participating professors and students, due to the differences of time and academic calendars. Second, the professors in charge tend to produce massive on-demand contents in a competitive way, in oreder to force students to grasp the entire picture of the topic given from specialist point of view. In this situation, we hoped that the ontology-based search engine would provide a useful tool for all the participants.

1 World Englishes and MiscommunicationsIn order to run a good experiment on ontology-

based search engine, we decided to use the course contents of “World Englishes and Miscommunica-tions” as a part of Applied Linguistics which needs to be dealt with in the future experiment. At this point, the course content is described below.

In this cyber course, the participating professors are asked to lecture each variety of English in Asia in terms of phonological, syntactic, semantic, and prag-

Session 5 Global Educational Networking/e-Pedagogy

126

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

matic features. Their lectures are videotaped and implemented as on-demand Internet lectures in which Power Point Slides and streaming videos are synchro-nized. The highlight of this course is 10 live sessions in the second semester, using multi-point cyber video conferencing system. We have 14 universities in Asia participating in the collaborative cyber sessions. Describing and scrutinizing the 9 varieties of English in Asia in terms of mutual intelligibility, comprehen-sibility, and interpretability, we explore the following five broad questions about the roles of English in our contemporary society:

1 Whether basic concepts in World Englishes or Asian Englishes are acceptable and appropriate in view of Standard English.

2 Does our localized variety of English impede our communication with native speakers

3 Is a localized variety of English use stigmatized4 Which do we support, English as an International

Language (Smith:1976), English as a Lingua Franca (Jenkins, 2000, & 2005 and Seidlehofer, 2004) or ‘Glocal English’(Pakir:1996)

5 Is it possible to standardize Englishes spoken in East Asia or more widely in Asia

The participating students approach these ques-tions by examining answers to them provided by the following lecturers.Part 1 Theoretical Background:Prof. Michiko Nakano IntroductionDr. Larry Smith English as an International Language

(1)Dr. Anne Pakir Direction for English Language

EducationDr. Jennifer Jenkins English as a Lingua FrancaDr David Block Identity in the second language

learning researchDr Claire Kramsch When you speak a foreign lan-

guage, are you a different person?Dr. Anne Pakir English as a glocal languageDr. Larry Smith English is an Asian LanguagePart 2 Singapore/Malay/ Philippine EnglishDr Anne Pakir and Dr. Low Ee Ling Singapore

English Dr Azirah Hashim Malay EnglishDr Danilo T. Dayag Philippine EnglishPart 3 India/Thai EnglishDr Tej K. Bhatia India English (1) Dr Ravinder Gargesh India English (2) Dr Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin Thai EnglishPart 4 China/Hong Kong/ Taiwan EnglishDr Tony T. N. Hung Hong Kong EnglishProf Xiong Xueliang China English Prof Wan

Prof. Andy Leung and Prof. David Dai Taiwan EnglishPart 5 Korea/Japan/Iraqi EnglishDr Kyung-ja Park and Dr Hikyoung Lee Korea English Dr. Kyutae Jung Korea English Prof. Yoji Tanabe Japan English (1)Dr. Michiko Nakano et al. Japan English (2)Dr. Abdullatif Al-Jumaily Iraqi English

For the ontology-based search engine experiment, we decided to deal with Thai English and Japan English, since the broadband experiment was admin-istered at Chulalornkong University and Waseda University.

3 Ontology-based Search Engine in the multilingual environmentOntology-based Dictionary (henceforth Ontology

Dictionary) grows itself by means of the cycle of tag-ging Learning Objects (LOs) by Metadata which cre-ates LOM, automatic renewal as well as manual renewal systems, as shown in Fig. 1.

Figure 1: System Image

Expert (Nakano) and System Service Manager (Kondo) provided draft for Ontology Dictionary which include central concepts, super-ordinate cate-gory names, subordinate hyponyms, synonyms and described the various relations for Japan English and Thai English. These are written in English and they are translated into Japanese as well as into Thai. These are used as materials to ontological definitions.

Registration of LOs stands for tagging ontological definitions in the system. The system automatically detects the portion of ontological definitions to be renewed. Simultaneously the relations among central concepts are automatically renewed. This information is transmitted to Thai Dictionary as well as to Japanese Dictionary separately and each Dictionary is

Distance Learning and the Internet Conference 2008

127

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

renewed. For this reason, LO users do not need to search Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) directly, butthey can search in the renewed Ontological Dictionary. Furthermore, the system includes manual renewal interface in which the renewed relationships among central concepts are checked for their accuracy by System Service Manager.

Figure 2: LO Tagging

Figure 3: LO (keyword ) tagging

Figure 4: Ontology Defi nitions

Figure 5: A partial list of Tagged LOs

Figure 6: LO Tagging in the Multilingual Environment

Figure 7: Key Word tagging in the multilingual environ-ment

Session 5 Global Educational Networking/e-Pedagogy

128

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

Figure 8: Multi-lingual Environment

Figure 9: Manual Renewal

Figure 10: Relations

Figure 11: Manual Renewal (simple addition)

Figure 12: Manual Renewal (Addition)

The first meeting was held on the 10th of September, 2007 and the system was installed by the end of December of the same year. The experiments to confirm the efficiency, adequacy and accuracy were administered in January, 2008.

3.1 Outline of the experimentLO users in Thailand and in Japan use the ontolog-

ical search engine to test how user-friendly the system is and how useful the result of the search is in study-ing many aspects of Thai English and Japan English. The participants are 10 LO users at Waseda University and 10 LO users at Chulalornkong University. They are either undergraduates or graduate sudents.

We had the following specific assessment tasks by LO users, Expert and System Service Manager in the experiment.

I Assessment tasks for the search engine with self-generative Ontological Dictionary

I-Task1 LO users watch three 5-minute on-demand lectures and search the relevant LO by inputting key-words which occurred to their mind. LO users and Expert use Ontological Dictionary tagged with LOM to see whether LO taggers tagged the relevant meta-data to LOs. This is to check the usefulness of the search engine with self-generative ontological dic-tionary.

I-Task2 System Service Manager are asked to relate central concepts manually in Ontological Dictionary. He evaluates its adequacy of the outcome and the effectiveness of the manual renewal.

I-Task3 LO users and Expert search LOs, with the keywords given to them. They use the search engine before and after the manual renewal of the self-gener-ative ontological dictionary. This is to check the ade-quacy of the manual renewal.

Distance Learning and the Internet Conference 2008

129

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

I-Task4 LO users and Expert search LOs, with the keywords given to them. They use the search engine before and after the automatic renewal of the self-generative ontological dictionary. This is to check the adequacy of the renewal cycle.

I-Task5 Expert and System Service Manager add man-ually more concepts to the Ontological Dictionary. This is to check the accuracy of the manual renewal and whether System Service Manager can play a sig-nificant role.

I-Task6 LO users look up super-ordinate terms, subor-dinate terms, synonyms and related terms freely. They are asked compare the initial Ontological Dictionary with the automatically renewed Ontological Dictionary.This is check whether the step-wise search interface is adequate or not.

II Assessment tasks in the multilingual environment with the self-generative Ontology dictionary

II-Task1 LO users in Chulalornkong University watch 5-minute on-demand lecture which are different from those used in the previous experiment. Using the search engine with the self-generative ontological dic-tionary, they confirm whether they can access the rel-evant LOs they are searching for. This is to check from a LO user’s point of view that tagged ontologi-cal definitions are useful in LOM search.

II-Task2 LO users at Waseda University watch 5-min-ute on-demand lecture which are different from those used in the previous experiment. Using the search engine with the self-generative ontological dictionary, they confirm whether they can access the relevant LOs they are searching for. This is to check from a LO user’s point of view that tagged ontological defi-nitions are useful in LOM search.

3.2 Result and Discussion10 students, one expert and one system adminis-

trative manager at Chularlornkong University and Waseda University respectively participated in the experiment. The six tasks in I Assessment tasks for the search engine with self-generative Ontological Dictionary and two II Assessment tasks in the mul-tilingual environment with the self-generative Ontology Dictionary are performed at separate ses-sions in January, 2008.

Experimental results for I-Task1 is shown Fig 15. 40% of LO users find their key words search corre-spond to Ontology definitions. Fig 16 illustrates that after adding concepts 67 % of LO users find Ontology Dictionary became more useful.

Figure 13: Keyword Search

Figure 14: Search Result

Figure 15: Result I-Task 1 Correspondences between LOM search and their keywords

Figure 16: Result I-Task2 (Japan only) after automatic renewal

Table 1 reveals that System Service Manager can relate concepts adequately in several domains. LO users find the relations 94% accurate: see Fig 17.

Session 5 Global Educational Networking/e-Pedagogy

130

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

Figure 17: LO users’ Assessment of System Service Manager

Table 1: Expert’s assessment of the Relations by System Service Manager

Fig 18 shows the result of I-Task4: the usefulness of manual renewal in Ontology Dictionary: see also Figs 19 and 20.

Figure 18: LO users assessment of manual renewal

Figure 19: LO users assessment of manual renewal

Figure 20: Expert’s assessment of Manual Renewal

The results for I-Task 4 is shown in Fig 21, Fig 22 and 23

Figure 21: Automatic Renewal

Figure 22: Automatic Renewal (LO users’ assessment)

Figure 23: Automatic Renewals (Expert Assessment)

Distance Learning and the Internet Conference 2008

131

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

The result of I-Tasks6 is shown in Figs 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29.

Figure 24: Assessment of Related Keywords

Figure 25: Assessment of classification of related Keywords as synonyms, super-ordinate, subordinate and related terms

Figure 26: Assessment of search in related keywords

Figure 27: Assessment of Renewals in the second search

Figure 28: Assessment of Search in Renewed related words

Figure 29: Assessment of Ontological Search

The result for II-Task1 is shown in Figs 30 and 31.

Figure 30: Assessment of Search Accuracy by Thai

Figure 31: Assessment of Search Accuracy by Japanese

The result for II-2 is shown in Figs 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 and 37.

Figure 32: Usefulness of Search in Thai

Session 5 Global Educational Networking/e-Pedagogy

132

Plenary S

essionsW

aseda University

Presentations

DLI R

eview &

Report

Sessio

n 1-3

Sessio

n 4-6

Sessio

n 7-9

Figure 33: Usefulness of Search in Non-Thai Materials by Thai

Figure 34: Search of Japanese Materials in English (Thai participants)

Figure 35: Usefulness of Search for Foreign Materials in Thai ((Thai participants)

Figure 36: Usefulness of Search in English Material in Thai (Thai participants)

4.0 ConclusionWe developed Ontology Dictionary which grows

itself by means of the cycle of tagging Learning Objects (LOs) by Metadata which creates LOM, auto-matic renewal as well as manual renewal systems. The system automatically detects the portion of onto-logical definitions to be renewed. Simultaneously the relations amongcentral concepts are automatically renewed.This information is transmitted to Thai Dictionary as well as to Japanese Dictionary sepa-rately and each Dictionary is renewed. For this rea-son, LO users do not need to search Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) directly, but they can search in the renewed ontological Dictionary. Furthermore, the sys-tem includes manual renewal interface in which the renewed relationships among central concepts are checked for their accuracy by System Service Manager.

LO users in Thailand and in Japan used the onto-logical search engine to test how user-friendly the system is and how useful the result of the search is in studying many aspects of Thai English and Japan English.

There were six Assessment tasks for the search engine with self-generative Ontology Dictionary and two Assessment tasks in the multilingual environment with the self-generative Ontology Dictionary. We obtained satisfactory results for these assessment tasks.

ReferenceKameyam, W. Ed. (2006) . Digi ta l Content

Distribution Textbook. Impress R&D.Nakano, M. (2006). Asian Englishes and their

Cultures [ajiano eigotachi to sono bunnka]. In Languages in Asia and their Cultures [ajia sekaino kotobato bunnka]. Ed. By Sunaoka, K and Ikeda, M. Seibun-do.

Nakano, M. (Ed.) (2007). On-demand Internet Course Book: World Englishes and Miscommunica-tions. Waseda University International.

Park, Kyung-ja and Nakano, M. (Eds). (2007). Asia Englishes and Miscommunication. Korea University Press.

Nakano, M. (2008). Englishes in Asia: Non-Native Pronunciation Features and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) [ajia chiiki no eigo: eigohatuon no tokucho to sekaikyoutugo tosi-teno eigo]. In Languages and Cultures in the world of Enlishes [eigo-sekai no kotoba to bunka], Ed., by Yano, Y and Ikeda, M. Seibundo.