Language Grid

In 2000s, the number of languages used on the Web increased rapidly, as more people communicate via the Internet. Although there was a huge volume of language resources on the Internet, such as language data and language processing software, there were difficulties in utilizing language resources for supporting intercultural collaboration without the involvement of linguistic professionals. This was caused by complicated contracts and intellectual property rights, and the variety of data structures and program interfaces.

We developed the Language Grid which allows users to share language resources as services on the Internet, based on a collective intelligence approach. By accessing the Language Grid, users could employ language services provided by universities, research institutes, and companies. Moreover, users could publish new language services by freely composing those language services according to their needs.

We conducted global research activities with researchers in the US, Europe and Asia to promotethe Language Grid. We successfully operated the Language Grid at Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University from 2007 and built the Asia-wide Language Grid by establishing several Language Grid Operation Centers in Thailand (2010) to collect Southeast Asian language services, in Indonesia (2012) to share Indonesia language services and Xinjiang, in China (2014) to accumulate Central Asian language services. These operation centers were federated with each other to share 225 language services for users. Moreover, we connected the language service infrastructures in ELDA/ELRA and US NSF projects that were built based on the Service Grid Server Software.

Using the language Grid, we developed various language services including bilingual dictionary induction. The research results have been published in top conferences and journals.

Project: Portal Site
See also Wikipedia

Selected Publication:

  • Toru Ishida Ed. The Language Grid: Service-Oriented Collective Intelligence for Language Resource Interoperability. Springer, 2011.
  • Toru Ishida, Yohei Murakami, Donghui Lin,.Takao Nakaguchi and Masayuki Otani. Language Service Infrastructure on the Web: The Language Grid. IEEE Computer, Vol. 51, Issues 6, pp. 72-81, 2018.
  • Mairidan Wushouer, Donghui Lin, Toru Ishida, and Katsutoshi Hirayama. A Constraint Approach to Pivot-based Bilingual Dictionary Induction. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, Vol. 15, No. 1, Article 4, 2016.
  • Yohei Murakami, Donghui Lin and Toru Ishida Eds. Services Computing for Language Resources, Springer, 2018.
  • Mai Xuan Trang, Yohei Murakami and Toru Ishida. Policy-Aware Service Composition: Predicting Parallel Execution Performance of Composite Services. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Vol.11, No.4, pp.602-615, 2018.
  • Arbi Haza Nasution, Yohei Murakami, Toru Ishida. A Generalized Constraint Approach to Bilingual Dictionary Induction for Low-Resource Language Families. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, Vol. 17, No. 2, Article 9, pp.1-12 2018.