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International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems

PRIMA 2016: PRIMA 2016: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems pp 3–19Cite as

Intercultural Collaboration and Support Systems: A Brief History

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9862))

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.

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Notes

  1. 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. 2.

    Internet World Users by Language - Top 10 Languages, Internet World Stats, Miniwatts Marketing Group, 30 June 2015, retrieved from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm.

  3. 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. 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. 5.

    The concept was first presented in a keynote speech at SAINT 2006 [9], and later in a book published in 2011 [12].

  6. 6.

    The concept fragmentation and recombination appeared in e-topia written by William J. Mitchell.

  7. 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. 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. 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. 10.

    Contrary, vertical service composition generates workflows based on AI planning technologies.

  11. 11.

    For example, the algorithm enables users to create a Uyghur-Kazakh dictionary from Uyghur-Chinese and Kazakh-Chinese dictionaries.

  12. 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. 13.

    Jakarta and Urumqi operation centers have just started at the University of Indonesia and Xinjiang University.

  14. 14.

    The Language Application Grid (LAPPS Grid) project in the US adopts the service grid server software described in this section.

  15. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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Acknowledgments

This work could not have been conducted without the collaboration of a number of colleagues and students. The work was partially supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) (24220002, 2012–2016) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan

    Toru Ishida

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  1. Toru Ishida
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Correspondence to Toru Ishida .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino , Torino, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni

  2. Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

    Amit K. Chopra

  3. Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA

    Tran Cao Son

  4. Graduate School of Maritime Sciences, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

    Katsutoshi Hirayama

  5. Dept. di Informatica: Sci. e Ingegneria, Universitá di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Paolo Torroni

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Ishida, T. (2016). Intercultural Collaboration and Support Systems: A Brief History. In: Baldoni, M., Chopra, A., Son, T., Hirayama, K., Torroni, P. (eds) PRIMA 2016: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. PRIMA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9862. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44832-9_1

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

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