Katsunori Kotani


2023

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The Association of Second Language Proficiency with Nonverbal Behaviors
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi
Proceedings of the 37th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2022

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A comparison of the validity of measurement methods of the general English proficiency by dictation and read-aloud performance
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi
Proceedings of the 36th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2018

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Assessment of an Index for Measuring Pronunciation Difficulty
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications

This study assesses an index for measur-ing the pronunciation difficulty of sen-tences (henceforth, pronounceability) based on the normalized edit distance from a reference sentence to a transcrip-tion of learners’ pronunciation. Pro-nounceability should be examined when language teachers use a computer-assisted language learning system for pronunciation learning to maintain the motivation of learners. However, unlike the evaluation of learners’ pronunciation performance, previous research did not focus on pronounceability not only for English but also for Asian languages. This study found that the normalized edit distance was reliable but not valid. The lack of validity appeared to be because of an English test used for determining the proficiency of learners.

2016

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Effectiveness of Linguistic and Learner Features to Listenability Measurement Using a Decision Tree Classifier
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA2016)

In learning Asian languages, learners encounter the problem of character types that are different from those in their first language, for instance, between Chinese characters and the Latin alphabet. This problem also affects listening because learners reconstruct letters from speech sounds. Hence, special attention should be paid to listening practice for learners of Asian languages. However, to our knowledge, few studies have evaluated the ease of listening comprehension (listenability) in Asian languages. Therefore, as a pilot study of listenability in Asian languages, we developed a measurement method for learners of English in order to examine the discriminability of linguistic and learner features. The results showed that the accuracy of our method outperformed a simple majority vote, which suggests that a combination of linguistic and learner features should be used to measure listenability in Asian languages as well as in English.

2015

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Application of a Corpus to Identify Gaps between English Learners and Native Speakers
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

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A survey of usage environment of machine translation by professional translators
Tomoki Nagase | Tatsuhiro Kudoh | Katsunori Kotani | Wenjun ye | Takeshi Mori | Yoshiyuki Sakamoto | Nobutoshi Hatanaka | Takamitsu Takeda | Shu Hirata | Hiromi Nakaiwa
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XV: User Track

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Design of a Learner Corpus for Listening and Speaking Performance
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi
Proceedings of the 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2014

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A Listenability Measuring Method for an Adaptive Computer-assisted Language Learningand Teaching System
Katsunori Kotani | Shota Ueda | Takehiko Yoshimi | Hiroaki Nanjo
Proceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing

2011

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Compiling Learner Corpus Data of Linguistic Output and Language Processing in Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi | Hiroaki Nanjo | Hitoshi Isahara
Proceedings of 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

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Automatic Error Analysis Based on Grammatical Questions
Tomoki Nagase | Hajime Tsukada | Katsunori Kotani | Nobutoshi Hatanaka | Yoshiyuki Sakamoto
Proceedings of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

2007

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Japanese Expressions that Include English Expressions
Masaki Murata | Toshiyuki Kanamaru | Koichiro Nakamoto | Katsunori Kotani | Hitoshi Isahara
Proceedings of the 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

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Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation Based on Rate of Accomplishment of Sub-Goals
Kiyotaka Uchimoto | Katsunori Kotani | Yujie Zhang | Hitoshi Isahara
Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Proceedings of the Main Conference

2005

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Selection of Entries for a Bilingual Dictionary from Aligned Translation Equivalents using Support Vector Machines
Takeshi Kutsumi | Takehiko Yoshimi | Katsunori Kotani | Ichiko Sata | Hitoshi Isahara
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit X: Papers

This paper claims that constructing a dictionary using bilingual pairs obtained from parallel corpora needs not only correct alignment of two noun phrases but also judgment of its appropriateness as an entry. It specifically addresses the latter task, which has been paid little attention. It demonstrates a method of selecting a suitable entry using Support Vector Machines, and proposes to regard as the features the common and the different parts between a current translation and a new translation. Using experiment results, this paper examines how selection performances are affected by the four ways of representing the common and the different parts: morphemes, parts of speech, semantic markers, and upper-level semantic markers. Moreover, we used n-grams of the common and the different parts of above four kinds of features. Experimental result found that representation by morphemes marked the best performance, F-measure of 0.803.

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A Useful-based Evaluation of Reading Support Systems: Comprehension, Reading Speed and Effective Speed
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi | Takeshi Kutsumi | Ichiko Sata | Hiroshi Isahara
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit X: Posters

This paper reports the result of our experiment, the aim of which is to examine the efficiency of reading support systems such as a sentence-machine translation system, a word-machine translation system, and so on. Our evaluation method used in the experiment is able to handle the different reading support systems by assessing the usability of the systems, i.e., comprehension, reading speed, and effective speed. The result shows that the reading-speed procedure is able to evaluate the support systems as well as the comprehension-based procedure proposed by Ohguro (1993) and Fuji et al. (2001).

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Toward a Unified Evaluation Method for Multiple Reading Support Systems: A Reading Speed-based Procedure
Katsunori Kotani | Takehiko Yoshimi | Takeshi Kutsumi | Ichiko Sata | Hitoshi Isahara
Companion Volume to the Proceedings of Conference including Posters/Demos and tutorial abstracts

2004

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Integrated Use of Internal and External Evidence in the Alignment of Multi-Word Named Entities
Takeshi Kutsumi | Takehiko Yoshimi | Katsunori Kotani | Ichiko Sata | Hitoshi Isahara
Proceedings of the 18th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation