Invited Speakers

Symposium on Language Resources

Masataka Goto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)

PodCastle is a public web service that provides full-text searching of speech data (podcasts) on the basis of automatic speech recognition technologies. PodCastle enables users to find podcasts that include a search term and read full texts of their recognition results. However, even state-of-the-art speech recognizers cannot correctly transcribe all podcasts because their content and recording environments vary very widely. PodCastle therefore encourages a number of anonymous users to cooperate by correcting speech recognition errors on our original easy-to-use interface so that podcasts can be searched more reliably. Furthermore, using the resulting corrections to train our speech recognizer, it implements a mechanism whereby the speech recognition performance is gradually improved. This is an instance of our new research approach, ``Speech Recognition Research 2.0'', which is aimed at providing users with a web service based on Web 2.0 so that they can experience state-of-the-art speech recognition performance, and at promoting speech recognition technologies in cooperation with anonymous users. We hope that this project will prove the importance and potential of incorporating user contributions into automatic pattern recognition technologies, and that various other projects that follow our approach will be done, thus adding a new dimension to this field of research.

Dr. Masataka Goto is the leader of the Media Interaction Group at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. In 1992 he was one of the first to start work on automatic music understanding, and has since been at the forefront of research in music technologies and music interfaces based on those technologies. Since 1998 he has also worked on speech recognition interfaces. He has published more than 160 papers in refereed journals and international conferences. Over the past 18 years, he has received 25 awards, including the Young Scientists' Prize, the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the Excellence Award in Fundamental Science of the DoCoMo Mobile Science Awards, and the Best Paper Award of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ). He has served as a committee member of over 60 scientific societies and conferences and was the General Chair of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2009), and the Chair of the IPSJ Special Interest Group on Music and Computer (SIGMUS).

Symposium: Toward a Linguistic Thoery of Ba: Semantics and Pragmatics of Ba

Qun Liu (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science)

Shirley N. Dita (De La Salle University)

Hee-Rahk Chae (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

Dictionaries have been one of the most important resources for linguistic research and applications. Ontologies are also becoming an indispensible resource not only for linguistics but also for other areas dealing with knowledge. In many cases, however, they fall short of our expectations. One reason for this under-expectation is that their basic units are not well-established. There are two kinds of basic units of dictionaries: head words and (word) senses. Head words have to be words rather than affixes or phrases. The meaning of a word has to be carved into different senses on the basis of objective criteria. The building blocks of ontologies have to be (simple and/or complex) concepts rather than senses. We will examine the morpho-syntactic status of head words in Korean (and Japanese) dictionaries. It will be shown that many head words are phrases and, hence, have to be removed from the list of head words. In addition, many elements that are treated as affixes are actually words and, hence, have to be registered as head words. We need to realize that agglutinative languages like Japanese and Korean have many clitics, i.e. (syntactic) words which have some affixal properties as well. Then, we will consider basic units of ontologies. Some scholars argue that they have to be senses rather than concepts. However, many scholars assume that they have to be concepts rather than senses. We will show, based on a variety of phenomena, that building blocks of ontologies should be concepts.

Hee-Rahk Chae obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Ohio State Univ. in 1992. The title of his thesis is "Lexically Triggered Unbounded Discontinuities in English: An Indexed Phrase Structure Grammar Approach." He is a professor in the Dept. of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Hankuk Univ. of Foreign Studies, Korea. From March 2006, he is leading a Brain Korea 21 team, whose research topic is "A Study of the Language-Neutral Ontology." Currently he is also serving as the President of the Korean Society for Cognitive Science and as the Secretary-in-General of the International Association for Cognitive Science. He has worked on such topics as light verb constructions, concord adverbial constructions, constructions involving clitic elements (case markers, postpostions, delimiters, etc.) and the like. With reference to the ontology project, he has focused on elucidating basic units of lexicons and ontologies, and relationships between them.