Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Cover of the book

2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Intercultural Collaboration and Support Systems: A Brief History

Author : Toru Ishida

Published in: PRIMA 2016: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

At the beginning of the new millennium, we proposed the concept of intercultural collaboration where participants with different cultures and languages work together towards shared goals. Because intercultural collaboration is a new area with scarce data, it was necessary to execute parallel experiments in both in real fields as well as in research laboratories. In 2002, we conducted a one-year experiment with Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Malaysian colleagues and students to develop open-source software oriented towards machine translation. From this experiment, we understood the necessity of a language infrastructure on the Internet that could create customized multilingual environments for various situations. In 2006, we launched the Language Grid project to realize a federated operation of servers for language services. Using the Language Grid, we worked with a nongovernmental organization since 2011 to support knowledge communications between agricultural experts in Japan and farmers in Vietnam via their children. We observed that a large community emerged to utilize these nonmature machine translation technologies. During these experiences, by facing different types of difficulties, we gradually came to understand the nature of intercultural collaboration. Problems are wicked and not easily defined because of their nested and open networked origin. Fortunately, multiagent technologies can be applied to model and simulate intercultural collaboration so as to predict the difficulties and to prepare a better support systems. In this paper, we provide a brief history of the research and practice as regards intercultural collaboration and support systems.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter Erratum to: PRIMA 2016: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems
next chapter Argumentation for Practical Reasoning: An Axiomatic Approach
Footnotes
1
There was no such concept at that time. We created the word “intercultural collaboration” by adding goals to intercultural communication, so that researchers in computer science can participate to advance methodologies and technologies to support multi-language and multicultural communities.
 
2
Internet World Users by Language - Top 10 Languages, Internet World Stats, Miniwatts Marketing Group, 30 June 2015, retrieved from http://​www.​internetworldsta​ts.​com/​stats7.​htm.
 
3
In this project, 32 students from Kyoto University (Japan), Shanghai Jiaotong University (China), Seoul National University and Handong University (South Korea), and University of Malaya (Malaysia) jointly developed software over the Internet.
 
4
Japanese students input Japanese sentences with many personal pronouns such as “I” and “you” so that the machine translators would generate better results, though Japanese do not often use personal pronouns in their conversations.
 
5
The concept was first presented in a keynote speech at SAINT 2006 [9], and later in a book published in 2011 [12].
 
6
The concept fragmentation and recombination appeared in e-topia written by William J. Mitchell.
 
7
The word grid is defined as “a system or structure for combining distributed resources; an open standard protocol is generally used to create high quality services.” Our approach, applying the grid concept to ensure the collaboration of language services, has not been tried before.
 
8
Service grid is a generic term meaning a framework where “services are composed to meet the requirements of a user community within constraints specified by the resource provider [14].”
 
9
As a result, we took only two years to start its operation. Around 30 organizations joined in December 2007 to share language resources.
 
10
Contrary, vertical service composition generates workflows based on AI planning technologies.
 
11
For example, the algorithm enables users to create a Uyghur-Kazakh dictionary from Uyghur-Chinese and Kazakh-Chinese dictionaries.
 
12
Sometimes it is impossible for different service grids to use exactly the same agreements. A typical problem is the governing law. For international affiliation, a possible idea is to adopt a common law like New York State law, but operators may wish to adopt the governing law of their own locations.
 
13
Jakarta and Urumqi operation centers have just started at the University of Indonesia and Xinjiang University.
 
14
The Language Application Grid (LAPPS Grid) project in the US adopts the service grid server software described in this section.
 
15
The project consists of our team in Kyoto University for providing the multilingual collaboration environment, NPO Pangaea for educating children and conducting experiments, University of Tokyo and Mie University for providing agricultural knowledge, Vietnam National University for local arrangements, and MARD/DARD for planning and controlling the whole process of the project.
 
16
For Japanese-Vietnamese translation, two translators, Japanese-English and English-Vietnamese, are cascaded using English as a pivot, because there is not enough data to create a direct translator between Japanese and Vietnamese. Since machine translators expect correct input, human bridgers are requested to post-edit translated sentences in the pivot language.
 
17
We conducted experiments 2011/02–2011/03, 2012/10–2013/01 and 2013/09–2014/01 in Thien My, Vinlong Province, and 2013/09–2014/01 and 2014/02–2014/03 in Dong Thanh, Vinlong Province. Both villages are located near Can Tho City in the Mekong Delta.
 
18
There are many interesting examples listed in Hiroko Nishida’s book on intercultural communication friction in Japanese companies operating in the US and Chinese market, published in 2007. The book is written in Japanese.
 
Literature
1.
Cho, H., Ishida, T., Takasaki, T., Oyama, S.: Assisting pictogram selection with semantic interpretation. In: Bechhofer, S., Hauswirth, M., Hoffmann, J., Koubarakis, M. (eds.) ESWC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5021, pp. 65–79. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)CrossRef
2.
Deutscher, G.: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Macmillan, London (2010)
3.
Fussell, S.R., Hinds, P., Ishida, T. (eds.): Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration. ACM (2009)
4.
Ben Hassine, A., Matsubara, S., Ishida, T.: A constraint-based approach to horizontal web service composition. In: Cruz, I., Decker, S., Allemang, D., Preist, C., Schwabe, D., Mika, P., Uschold, M., Aroyo, L.M. (eds.) ISWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4273, pp. 130–143. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)CrossRef
5.
Gilbert, N., Troitzsch, K.: Simulation for the Social Scientist. Open University Press, London (1999)
6.
Hayashi, Y., Declerck, T., Buitelaar, P., Monachini, M.: Ontologies for a global language infrastructure. In: International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources, pp. 105–112 (2008)
7.
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.J., Minkov, M.: Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 3rd edn. McGraw-Hill, London (2010)
8.
Hofstede, G.J., Pedersen, P.: Synthetic cultures: intercultural learning through simulation games. Simul. Gaming 30(4), 415–440 (1999)CrossRef
9.
Ishida, T.: Language grid: an infrastructure for intercultural collaboration. In: IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and the Internet, pp. 96–100 (2006)
10.
Ishida, T., Fussell, S.R., Vossen, P.T.J.M. (eds.): Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration. Springer, Berlin (2007)
11.
Ishida, T., Nakajima, Y., Murakami, Y., Nakanishi, H.: Augmented experiment: participatory design with multiagent simulation. In: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1341–1346 (2007)
12.
Ishida, T. (ed.): The Language Grid: Service-Oriented Collective Intelligence for Language Resource Interoperability. Springer, Berlin (2011)
13.
Kita, K., Takasaki, T., Lin, D., Nakajima, Y., Ishida, T.: Case study on analyzing multi-language knowledge communication. In: International Conference on Culture and Computing (2012)
14.
Krauter, K., Buyya, R., Maheswaran, M.: A taxonomy and survey of grid resource management systems for distributed computing. Softw. Pract. Experience 32(2), 135–164 (2002)CrossRefMATH
15.
Lin, D., Murakami, Y., Ishida, T., Murakami, Y., Tanaka, M.: Composing human and machine translation services: language grid for improving localization process. In: International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (2010)
16.
Lusch, R., Vargo, S.: Service-Dominant Logic: Premises, Perspectives, Possibilities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2014)
17.
Masuda, T., Nisbett, R.E.: Attending holistically versus analytically: comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 81(5), 922 (2001)CrossRef
18.
Matsuno, J., Ishida, T.: Constraint optimization approach to context based word selection. In: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1846–1851 (2011)
19.
Mori, Y., et al.: Youth mediated communication - agricultural technology transfer to illiterate farmers through their children. In: World Conference on Computers in Agriculture (2012)
20.
Morita, D., Ishida, T.: Collaborative translation by monolinguals with machine translators. In: International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 361–366 (2009)
21.
Murakami, Y., Tanaka, M., Lin, D., Ishida, T.: Service grid federation architecture for heterogeneous domains. In: IEEE Ninth International Conference on Services Computing, pp. 539–546 (2012)
22.
Nisbett, R.: The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and. Simon and Schuster, New York (2010)
23.
Nomura, S., Ishida, T., Yamashita, N., Yasuoka, M., Funakoshi, K.: Open source software development with your mother language: intercultural collaboration experiment 2002. Int. Conf. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, 1163–1167 (2003)
24.
Setlock, L.D., Fussell, S.R., Neuwirth, C.: Taking it out of context: collaborating within and across cultures in face-to-face settings and via instant messaging. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 604–613 (2004)
25.
Suo, Y., Miyata, N., Morikawa, H., Ishida, T., Shi, Y.: Open smart classroom: extensible and scalable learning system in smart space using web service technology. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 21(6), 814–828 (2009)CrossRef
26.
Takasaki, T., Mori, Y.: Design and development of a pictogram communication system for children around the world. In: Ishida, T., Fussell, S., Vossen, P. (eds.) IWIC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4568, pp. 193–206. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)CrossRef
27.
Tanaka, M., Murakami, Y., Lin, D., Ishida, T.: Service supervision for service-oriented collective intelligence. In: IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, pp. 154–161 (2010)
28.
Tanaka, R., Murakami, Y., Ishida, T.: Context-based approach for pivot translation services. In: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1555–1561 (2009)
29.
Tsunoda, K., Hishiyama, R.: Design of multilingual participatory gaming simulations with a communication support agent. In: ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, pp. 17–25 (2010)
30.
Torii, D., Ishida, T., Bousquet, F.: Modelling agents and interactions in agricultural economics. In: International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 81–88 (2006)
31.
Trang, M.X., Murakami, Y., Ishida, T.: Policy-aware parallel execution in service composition. In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (2016, to appear)
32.
Wang, H.C., Fussel, S.F., Setlock, L.D.: Cultural difference and adaptation of communication styles in computer-mediated group brainstorming. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 669–678 (2009)
33.
Wushouer, M., Lin, D., Ishida, T., Hirayama, K.: A constraint approach to pivot-based bilingual dictionary induction. ACM Trans. Asian Low-Resour. Lang. Inf. Process. 15(1), Article 4 (2015)
34.
Yamashita, N., Ishida, T.: Effects of machine translation on collaborative work. In: International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 515–523 (2006)
35.
Yamashita, N., Inaba, R., Kuzuoka, H., Ishida, T.: Difficulties in establishing common ground in multiparty group using machine translation. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 679–688 (2009)
Metadata
Title
Intercultural Collaboration and Support Systems: A Brief History
Author
Toru Ishida
Copyright Year
2016
Book
PRIMA 2016: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-44831-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-44832-9

Copyright Year: 2016

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44832-9_1

Premium Partner

    Image Credits