The author has been engaged in research for many years in various fields, using ontology engineering techniques to symbolize the know-how and tricks possessed by veterans in the field and to pass on knowledge. In such research, it is very difficult to conduct empirical experiments, i.e., to measure the effects of research results by applying them to people, if ethical restrictions are strictly observed. This paper introduces and discusses the difficulties of balancing strict adherence to ethical rules and the smooth progress of research, based on several cases that the author has experienced in the past.

Growth in the mobile services industry has remarkably increased in the number of mobile services provided, and present methods of service provision have proven insufficient to guide users efficiently to the services they need. To solve this problem, a task-oriented menu, which enables users to search for services by "what they want to do" instead of by "name of category", has been proposed. Construction of such a task-oriented menu is based on a task ontology modeling method which supports the description of user activity such as task execution and the solving of obstacles encountered during the task. This paper discusses a task ontology-based modeling method which supports the description of users' activity and related knowledge such as how to solve problems that occurs on the users and prevention method for accidents. Models described by our method contribute to checking, designing and improving mobile Internet services.

This paper introduces a new tool for supporting multilingual communication between speakers of different languages. Conventional tools such as electronic dictionaries enable users to communicate basic intentions to others, but are often insufficient to help understand replies. The input of a Japanese sentence in the proposed tool not only produces a translation of the sentences but also displays a window featuring possible answers. The authors have evaluated the function of a prototype system which resulted in a thorough understanding of the merits and comings of the proposed tool.

This paper presents a new parsing algorithm, BTH, which is capable of efficiently parsing a keyword lattice that contains a large number of false alarms. The BTH parser runs without unfolding the given keyword lattice, and thus it can efficiently obtain a set of word sequences acceptable to the given grammar as the parser result. The algorithm has been implemented on Windows-based PCs and is tested by applying it to a car navigation task that has a scale of practical applications. The result indicates promise in implementing the function of a sentence utterance-based spontaneous speech understanding in next-generation car navigation systems. 1.