Dr. Kinji ONO
Professor and Director
Research and Development Department, NACSIS

The NACSIS R & D Department carries out research activities according to the mission of each division as well as project-type research which cross organizational and subject division.

NACSIS offers research opportunities in various ways to researchers. One of these systems is “NACSIS Co-operative Research,” common system among the national cooperative research institutions, providing domestic travel fund for the participants. The system is, in principle, open to researchers in Japan, and there have been considerable participation by external researchers.

In the fiscal year 1998, four programs were carried out:

1. Study Research on International Bibliographic Control in Japan
2. Lexical and Lexicological Study on Term Formation and Terminological Growth
3. Study on Automated Creation of Content-Based Video Indexing Information
4. A Study on Document Image Analysis and Support System for Constructing Digital Document Databases

Study Research on International Bibliographic Control in Japan

This started in 1992, is lead by Mr. Eisuke NAITO, Professor, with sub-themes such as ‘dissemination of research results,’ ‘international bibliographic control.’ Six university libraries have been participating in the feasibility program for network publishing of research results. The proceedings of the “One day workshop organized by the IFLA Standing Committee on Library Services to Multicultural Populations sponsored by the IFLA Committees of Cataloguing and of Classification & Indexing. 29 August 1996, Beijing” was published in August 1997 as a part of the program. Bibliographic databases and directory of researchers in the field of East Asian studies (Islamic studies) were also tested with the Center for East Asian Cultural Studies for UNESCO, The Toyo Bunko.

Study of Term Formation and Terminological Growth (for possible applications in NLP and IR)

As ‘term’ is conceptually consolidated at the level of parole, the study of term formation and terminological growth should be carried out at a concrete level on the basis of actual vocabulary of individual domains, i.e. terminolgies. Therefore, it is crucially important to prepare the basic data that represent terminologies of various domains. Based on this recognition, Dr. Kyo KAGEURA, Associate Professor of NACSIS, and Mr. Masahiko ISHII, Researcher at National Language Research Institute, are working on (i) constructing the basic terminological data for the study of term formation and terminological growth, (ii) clarifying various viewpoints that are important for the study of term formation and terminological growth, and (iii) examining the possible technical framework that can be used for describing term formation and terminological growth.

Study on Automated Creation of Content-Based Video Indexing Information

This is lead by Dr. Shin’ichi SATOH, Associate Professor, to pursue analyses of video information as multimedia contents by taking a multimodal approach including image processing, speech recognition, natural-language processing, and so on. Dr. Yuichi NAKAMURA, Assistant Professor, Tsukuba University, is another principal investigator for this co-operative research. The first and the second Workshop on Multimodal Video Processing were held in NACSIS Seminar House for Advenced Studies in Karuizawa in May and November, respectively, inviting domestic principal researchers in the video analysis field. In two workshops, domestic and international principal researches were studied and in-depth discussion was made for each of researchers’ works.

Study on Document Image Analysis and Support System for Constructing Digital Document Databases

This is lead by Dr. Atsuhiro TAKASU, Associate Professor, to investigate effective and efficient ways of acquiring scholarly information based on document image analysis. This research aims at developing a methodology to organize digital document databases from existing hardcopy and enrich the information by accumulating and associating multimedia information with the captured digital documents. The research group is organized with three researchers in NACSIS and one researcher from Osaka Prefectural University and applies the document image analysis, three dimensional object recognition, computational linguistics and machine learning techniques to digital document database organization.