We propose a Question Answering (QA) method that answers actions for a how-question. We model an action as a verb phrase consisting of a main verb and its governing noun phrase. Existing QA methods resemble consulting dictionaries and encyclopedias, in ...

In this paper, we propose an approach to transformation of fundamental frequency (F₀) contours for conversational speech synthesis. The figure of F₀ in relations to the period of cycles of sound waves is one branch of the rectangular hyperbola. Based on ...

In this paper, we propose a new dynamic selection method of the best search engine for a user's query. When users retrieve on the Internet, the expert users manually select the best search engine for their queries. However, the most important problem is ...

This paper studies the issue of conceptually indexing the blogosphere through the whole hierarchy of Wikipedia entries. This paper proposes how to link Wikipedia entries to blog feeds in the Japanese blogosphere by machine learning, where about 300,000 ...

We propose a method for searching for comprehensible how-to information on the Web. In our how-to information search, we use lightweight analysis of Web pages to extract how-to information from Web pages obtained by conventional Web search engines and ...

Recently, we have been able to often compare two objects using search engines. However, we often browse high ranked Web pages by search engines, which may give biased information. We propose a method for searching Web pages where two objects are ...

This paper gives an overview of the Sensing Web project, launched in 2007 in Japan. The project's aim is to open the data obtained by the sensors existing in our daily living environment for various purposes. Since the data obtained by observing the ...

The fast production of information in molecular biology, driven by high-throughput experiments, leads to strong ongoing demands for the integration of the literature into the information and knowledge discovery channels of the biomedical research ...

With the spread of Geoweb, people can more easily create and exchange geo-spatiotemporal contents on the Web. Consequently, it becomes an emerging issue to manage exploding amount of Geoweb contents more efficiently than traditional approaches for ...

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is emerging as a paradigm for developing distributed application. As the development of hardware and software technology, fast increasing of peers or services has issued critical problems for the popularity of SOA. ...

In a conventional 3D sound field reproduction system using wave field synthesis, numerous loudspeakers are placed around the listener. However, since such a system is very expensive and loudspeakers are in the listener's field of vision, it is very ...

Various high-fidelity VAD systems are developed for many practical application fields including games, home theatre, virtual reality, and military simulator, etc. Head-related Transfer Function is the one of key functions widely used in VAD system.

We ...

Since our daily lives strongly depend on information obtained by Web search, the credibility of Web search results has become crucial. An important aspect of the credibility of search results is regionality of Web pages. In this paper, we propose a ...

The World Wide Web comprises a wide variety of evaluative information. It consists of positive and negative opinions on innumerable topics from various perspectives, thus proving to be a useful information source for information credibility analysis. To ...

Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) currently has nineteen research groups that cover various areas in computer science. The Web InTelligence (WIT) Group, led by Chin-Yew Lin, is a recent spin-off from the Natural Language Computing Group, and tackles ...

This paper reports the ongoing development of a large-scale Web crawler and search engine infrastructure at National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. This infrastructure has the following characteristics: (1) It collects one ...

The task of extracting opinions/evaluations related to a given topic from a large number of documents such as Web documents is crucial for developing an automatic evaluation finding system, which can handle a wide variety of topics as input. In this ...

This paper reports the system QRpotato, which exhaustively collects bilingual technical term pairs from the Web. The system uses bilingual (Japanese-English) term pairs taken from existing terminological dictionary as seed pairs, search Web pages using ...

Previous systems for human hand posture estimation have adopted clustered multi-layer large-scale database with narrowing of search space by its past estimation results. But once an estimated result at a time is out of the search space, the system can't ...