Towards a Language Service Infrastructure for Mobile Environments

Towards a Language Service Infrastructure for Mobile Environments Nguyen Cao Hong Ngoc, Donghui Lin, Takao Nakaguchi, and Toru Ishida Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-Ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan nchngoc@ai.soc.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp, {lindh, nakaguchi, ishida}@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp Abstract Since mobile devices have feature-rich configurations and provide diverse functions, the use of mobile devices combined with the language resources of cloud environments is high promising for achieving a wide range communication that goes beyond the current language barrier. However, there are mismatches between using resources of mobile devices and services in the cloud such as the different communication protocol and different input and output methods. In this paper, we propose a language service infrastructure for mobile environments to combine these services. The proposed language service infrastructure allows users to use and mashup existing language resources on both cloud environments and their mobile devices. Furthermore, it allows users to flexibly use services in the cloud or services on mobile devices in their composite service without implementing several different composite services that have the same functionality. A case study of Mobile Shopping Translation System using both a service in the cloud (translation service) and services on mobile devices (Bluetooth low energy (BLE) service and text-to-speech service) is introduced. Keywords: language service infrastructure, mobile environment, service composition 1. Introduction Due to the developments of both transportation systems and the Internet, geographical distance is no longer a barrier for people to communicate with each other (Cairncross, 2001). Intercultural and multilingual activities are occurring fre- quently in daily life (Kim, 2000). However, differences in language and culture remain critical issues (Sechrest et al., 1972) (McGorry, 2000) (Scollon et al., 2011) (Piller, 2011), that raise difficulties in understanding each other, and limit us from achieving the fullest communication expected. Re- cent significant advances in technology have made mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets to popular in daily life. The advantages of mobile devices should make it pos- sible to overcome language barriers in communication. Consider the scenario of a Japanese girl traveling to Viet- nam with an American. While walking on the street, her smart phone receives notification of a special discount at a Vietnamese restaurant. The notification and further infor- mation on her phone are in Japanese while her friend, the American, receives the same notification but in English. It is very convenient for them because they do not know Viet- namese and the local are not good at English or Japanese. It is good for both travelers and the businesses since without the notification and translation, travelers may face the lin- guistic barrier and the restaurant may miss out on potential customers. To solve the similar problems, the concept of mobile cloud computing (Qureshi et al., 2011) (Bahl et al., 2012) (Khan et al., 2014), where the mobile device can use the cloud for data processing, has been proposed. Several mobile cloud applications are available, for example Google Map, Gmail for iPhone, Cisco’s WebEx on iPad. To implement such ap- plications, developers must have good knowledge …

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