When people communicate in their native languages using machine translation, they face various problems in constructing common ground. This study investigates the difficulties of constructing common ground when multiparty groups (consisting of more than two language communities) communicate using machine translation. We compose triads whose members come from three different language communities-China, Korea, and Japan-and compare their referential communication under two conditions: in their shared second language (English) and in their native languages using machine translation. Consequently, our study suggests the importance of not only grounding between speaker and addressee but also grounding between addressees in constructing effective machine-translation-mediated communication. Furthermore, to successfully build common ground between addressees, it seems important for them to be able to monitor what is going on between a speaker and other addressees.
Awareness about Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the purposes for offering and adopting OERs and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were analyzed using a detailed survey of higher education across Japan, which was conducted in 2015. A comparison with a similar study conducted in 2013 revealed that awareness of OERs has increased slightly and the number of MOOCs offered has increased significantly in the intervening two years. The increase of offerings and adoption was low for OERs but high for MOOCs. OERs are used to improve the learning environment for students, while MOOCs aim to promote lifelong learning. Only one-fifth of the institutions surveyed in 2013 offered MOOCs or advanced their plans to offer them in 2015, and institutions that did offer MOOCs or advance such plans to offer them after the previous survey tended to provide MOOCs for society and for promotional purposes, not only for themselves because Japanese institutions are self-sustainable in terms of open education activities, operating without the support of the government or foundations
Abstract. Our proposed "Language Grid" infrastructure supports multilingual communication by combining in new way language resources, such as machine translators, morphological analyzers, and dictionaries specific to user communities. We developed the Language Grid as a language infrastructure on the Internet. The Language Grid enables user communities to combine two or more machine translators and their community dictionaries by workflows, and to easily create new multilingual services specific to the communities. Because the quality of language services is not often defined, however, we need to confirm that the created multilingual service is really useful. We need to extend the process of general usability testing to the multilingual environment. For example, cooperation between user communities and language grid providers can significantly improve the accuracy of machine translation: it turns out that machine translations can be useful for interactive communication in the field of inter-cultural collaboration.
Objectives It is important to clarify the relationship between irreversible organ damage and the quality of life (QOL) by considering the unique factors of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). We aimed to clarify their correlation using SLE-specific QOL assessment tools. We also aimed to identify which type of organ damage is adversely correlated with the QOL. Methods We conducted a questionnaire-based survey of outpatients with SLE at Kyoto University Hospital and evaluated irreversible organ damage using the SLICC/ACR damage index (SDI). LupusPRO and the SLE symptom checklist (SSC) were employed as SLE-specific QOL tools, and the SF-36v2 was used as a conventional QOL tool. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed to examine the correlations between the total SDI score and each QOL score, and between each SDI item/system score and each QOL score. Results We analyzed the data of 265 patients. The total SDI score was significantly correlated with physical (PCS) and role/social component summary (RCS) of the SF-36v2, health-related QOL (HRQOL) of LupusPRO, and SSC ( p < 0.001). Among the SDI items, atrophy/weakness and osteoporosis with fracture/vertebral collapse were negatively correlated with PCS (β = −0.40, p < 0.001/β = −0.28, p < 0.001), RCS (β = −0.30, p < 0.001/β = −0.35, p < 0.001), and HRQOL (β = −0.34, p < 0.001/β = −0.31, p < 0.001), respectively. Among the SDI systems, musculoskeletal damage had higher negative correlations with PCS (β = −0.51, p < 0.001), RCS (β = −0.29, p < 0.001), and HRQOL (β = −0.40, p < 0.001). Conclusion We demonstrated the QOL of patients with SLE is negatively correlated with irreversible organ damage. We also revealed musculoskeletal damage is adversely correlated with the health-related QOL, especially the physical and role/social QOL.
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