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日本語サポートを含む Ubiquity 0.5 リリース

mitcho — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:01:33 +0000

Mozilla Japan ブログで Ubiquity を紹介する投稿を上げたので、ここでもクロスポストします。 Here’s a cross-post of a Ubiquity 0.5 announcement (in particular regarding the new Japanese support) I wrote for the Mozilla Japan blog.

Mozilla Labs の実験的プロジェクトのひとつ、 Ubiquity の最新版、バージョン 0.5 を昨日リリースしました。 (Mozilla Labs 正式発表 [英文])

Ubiquity はウェブをより有益に、より使いやすくするために自然言語で Firefox を操作するインターフェースを提供します。ウェブ上のオープン API と機能が増えて行く一方でどのようなインターフェースが必要であるのか。その答えを追求した結果、テキスト入力の正確さとスピードと自然言語の心地よさを合わせたインターフェースができあがりました。例えば「麹町を地図で表示」、「これを (誰々) へメール」などを自分の言葉で入力してブラウザを操作することができます。新しいコマンド (動詞) も簡単に JavaScript で書けるので、拡張性も非常に高いプラットフォームです。

ユーザにとって「自然な構文」 (“natural syntax” [英文]) という目標の下、数ヶ月の研究の結果、Ubiquity 0.5 では複数の言語の異なる構文に対応できるパーサを実装しました。Ubiquity 内蔵のコマンドもローカライズ可能になり、0.5 ではすべての内蔵コマンドの日本語、デンマーク語とポルトガル語版が搭載されています。

リリース直前に Ubiquity の日本語紹介ビデオを作成しましたので、どうぞご覧ください。日本語モードでの使用方法も説明されています。

Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ from mitcho on Vimeo.

日本語サポートが入った Ubiquity 0.5 を是非ご使用ください。このインターフェースをより多くのユーザが「自然に」使えるよう、これからも開発を続けていきたいと思います。

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Ubiquity presentation at Tokyo 2.0

mitcho — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:54:13 +0000

This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.

I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

The event also coincided with Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane Asia tour, attracting even more interest to the event. In the end it was the largest Tokyo 2.0 event ever.

As I leave Tokyo next month, I’ll be sad to not be able to continue to be a part of Tokyo 2.0. I’ve met a lot of fascinating people and learned a lot at the monthly events. I’ll definitely make sure to schedule them in in my future travels back to Japan and I highly recommend any of you who travel to Tokyo do so as well.

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Notes from BarCamp Tokyo 2009

mitcho — Mon, 18 May 2009 05:40:54 +0000

This past Saturday was Tokyo BarCamp 2009 at Sun’s Yoga offices. I of course gave a presentation on Ubiquity and our recent localization efforts, including Parser 2. As you can see, I signed up quickly:

CC-BY-NC iMorpheus

Here are the slides I used in that session. There are two “demo” sections in the slides… the first was a simple demo of Ubiquity 0.1.x showing off the translate, map, and edit-page commands. The second demo was of Ubiquity Parser 2 and showing off how little code it takes to add your language to Ubiquity with Parser 2.

I also led a brief afternoon discussion on open ideas: the approach of working in the open, making the thought process and decisions public, not just the results. Here are the slides for that one:

My impetus for doing this discussion is probably clear to many—as I go back to academia this fall, I’ve been recently wondering about whether I could apply the open process used at Mozilla to my own academic work, blogging frequently about little thoughts and discoveries, even if they turn out to be wrong or dead-ends. For those who are interested, Brian Lockwood caught some of my slides and the discussion on video.

I also found a great photo from the discussion—I’m right there on the left edge.

CC-BY-SA LostInInaka

Sun’s facilities had a combination of different styles of rooms (lecture/presentation, this large seminar-style, a small-group one) which was very nice for different styles of sessions.

I really enjoyed meeting the Yokohama International School IT department folks who had an interesting presentation (video) on how they live stream their department meetings every week and try to be open and benefit from (and give back to) an ed-tech community larger than themselves. Other highlights for me included Mitch Altman’s session on hacker spaces and “hacking” of all varieties and sorts, Karamoon’s very knowledgeable longer session on security (video).

Finally it’s good to point out that my friend Kim Ahlström open-sourced his website jisho.org. You can now get that entire repository on github. He also demoed the Cereling library/wrapper for various parsers and morphological tools which his company will be open-sourcing in the future. Happy hacking!

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Attachment Ambiguity—or—when is the gyudon cheap?

mitcho — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:17:05 +0000

Every day on the way to work I walk by a fine establishment known as Yoshinoya (吉野家), Japan’s largest gyudon (牛丼) chain restaurant. For those of you whose lives have yet to be graced by gyudon, it’s a bowl of rice topped with beef and onions stewed in a sweet-savory soy-based sauce. Loving gyudon and being a cheapskate, I naturally noticed the recent 50 yen off gyudon promotion at Yoshinoya. The above photo is a photo of part of that sign.

Part of this sign, though, made me think about our new Ubiquity parser. In particular, it was the attachment ambiguity in the end date of the promotion. The text in the photo above literally is “April 15th (Wed.) 8PM until”. (Note that Japanese is a strongly head-final language, and that the “until” is a postposition.) There are two possible readings for this expression, as illustrated by the two composition trees below.

The first tree, on the left, represents the reading “until (April 15th 8PM)”, while the second represents two arguments: “on April 15th” and “until 8PM”. In other words, in the first reading, the promotion begins at some earlier date and extends until April 15th at 8PM while, in the second reading, the promotion is one day only, on April 15th, until 8pm. Such syntactic ambiguities are called “attachment ambiguities” in linguistics as it is an ambiguity of where different arguments “attach” in a tree representation.

This attachment ambiguity was possible because there was no clear marker on “April 15th,” which may have disambiguated it as “on April 15th”. In fact, in many languages this time position argument comes with no case marker or preposition, or it’s optional, making parsing for them difficult. If such a sentence is entered with spaces, the Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation would try a parse where “8PM” is the “until” or goal argument and “April 15th” is an object argument, but it will only check its noun type, not put it in the correct semantic role (position). Perhaps this is something to think about in the future.

These types of situations will surely come up as we continue work on the Ubiquity parser, making it essential to look at different languages. Are there certain kinds of arguments in your language that do not have any word-external markers such as case or prepositions/postpositions?

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Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表

mitcho — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:29:30 +0000

Yesterday I presented on Ubiquity internationalization and the new parser design at the Mozilla Extension Development Meeting (Japanese), a community event organized by some extension developers in Japan. There were a couple other Ubiquity-related “lightning talks” as well, so I’ll summarize some of the interesting ideas from those talks below.

昨日第11回Mozilla拡張機能勉強会で Ubiquity の国際化と次世代パーサについて発表してきました。色々鋭いコメントをいただき、僕も良い勉強になりました。^^ スライドの方をslideshareに載せたので、是非参考にまた見てみてください。ライトニングトークでも Ubiquity の話で盛り上がったので、そのLTの内容で特に面白いと僕が思ったものを下に英語でちょっとまとめてみます。

Mozilla Ubiquity の国際化と次世代パーサ

mar of Japanese SuMo fame (not that sumo) presented on his foray into the development of an improved Japanese parser based on Jono’s. One interesting approach his parser took was to split up the input on delimiters like commas and parse each “clause” and then combining the arguments for one execution. This allows certain types of fronting constructions. For example:
```
...を   送って、 dynamisに
...-NOM send, dynamis-to
```
“To dynamis, send …”
This type of input, aside from being pretty natural in Japanese, has the advantage of offering the parser an unambiguous argument parse within each clause, cutting down on the possible ambiguities.

mar’s discussion, however, also naturally touched on the limitations of the current NLParser implementation, making localization of individual commands and the suggestion of verbs quite difficult.
Hitoshi SASAKI of the Sasaki Lab at Takushoku University discussed some possible applications of Ubiquity in an educational context. In particular he demoed a `hiragana` command which takes some sentence in kanji and rewrites it in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic alphabet. What’s more, the command lets you specify the appropriate grade level for the substitution, making it appropriate for elementary school kids and non-native speakers alike. Sasaki thought the ability to access this kind of functionality right from the content page was of great benefit to this application.

Thanks to dynamis for supporting my Japanese presentation and making this happen! ^^

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Listening

mitcho — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:07:03 +0000

Went to Tokyo 2.0 last night to hear about OpenSocial and kakuteru.com. De facto resident photographer Jim Grisanzio got a nice pic of me. ^^

photo credit: jimgris

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Ichifuku ramen—一福ラーメン

mitcho — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:57:06 +0000

About two doors down from my new place is a restaurant serving ramen (ラーメン, derived from the Chinese 拉麵), a distinctive type of noodle. Ramen noodles are wheat-based but crucially use kansui (鹹水), a mineral-rich water.¹ This water colors the noodles yellow and helps add a certain firmness to the noodles. The noodles can be served in a variety or different ways (with regional variations as well), but it is most often served in a miso-, soy sauce-, pork broth-, or salt-based soup.

The store down the street is called ichifuku (一福). Not only is it one of the closest restaurants to my house, it’s also been featured on a number of ramen restaurants and websites. The store is known for its delicious miso ramen but also for its more creative, Western-style arrangements. The female shopkeeper is often running everything by herself, gardening out front as well as cooking and playing great music.

Here are some pictures of the great food they serve:

If you ever come by the Hatsudai area, I highly recommend a visit. The address is: 東京都渋谷区本町６−６−４.

NB: Kansui in Japanese refers to a specific type of solution, while the same word in Chinese simply means “salt water.” ↩

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My Palace Mansion

mitcho — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:30:20 +0000

I’m certainly not the first one who’s noticed that Japanese apartment buildings often have weird English names (I can think of Tony László in one of the ダーリンは外国人 books.) In fact, I moved into my very own “Palace Mansion” myself a couple weeks ago. No, really. That’s the name of the place.

A mansion? By Japanese standards, yes.¹ A palace? Um… not quite. Take a look—here are some pictures from my move-in.

The apartment has three bedrooms and shared small kitchen/dining room, bath, and toilet. I live here with two other Japanese salary-men who are older than I. We all live pretty busy lives and don’t run into each other much. And, believe it or not, I found it on Tokyo Craigslist.

While it may not resemble a “palace mansion,” it definitely has its perks. For starters, it’s a fifteen-twenty minute walk from my work, which is a great plus in a land of long train commutes. It’s in a quiet, down-to-earth neighborhood—right next to the Children’s Center and a block or two from a old-style shopping district (商店街 shōtengai)—while also one train station away from Shinjuku station, which is a major transit hub.² There’s a fabulous (and apparently slightly famous) ramen a couple doors down. And finally, while small, it’s definitely one of the cheapest places I saw.

But let’s back up a moment and let you in on how I got here.

I moved from Taiwan to Japan at the end of June after the end of my Fulbright. ³ While doing the regular job search⁴ I registered with a search firm with a focus on bilinguals, Robert Walters. I had a great experience with them and ultimately accepted a position introduced to me by them. I started on August first as Online Game Programmer at Gameloft.⁵

I was weary of blogging about my job search at all during it, but I hope to break the radio silence and start blogging again about my new life here in Tokyo. ^^

マンション (“mansion”) in Japanese actually refers to an apartment complex of at least a certain size. It’s an instance of 和製英語—English-sounding words in the Japanese lexicon which, for some reason or another, do not actually exist or mean the same thing in English. ↩
Um, by which I mean, the biggest train station in the world by passenger volume. ↩
If you’d been following me on Twitter, however, you would have been at least slightly more in touch with my life. :p ↩
Some of my best resources included ecentral (where I almost took a job, actually), daijob, and enjapan. I also went to a job fair focusing on bilingual (or semi-bilingual) job-seekers: Career Forum (CFN). I should also express my disgust toward recruit, the big household name among job sites, now operated by Yahoo, just as I found it very difficult to use/navigate and seemingly ill-planned-out. YMMV. ↩
Speaking of, “the views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.” I should probably add that somewhere… I’ll get on it. ↩

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