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This paper focuses on analyzing (Japanese) splogs based on various characteristics of keywords contained in them. We estimate the behavior of spammers when creating splogs from other sources by analyzing the characteristics of keywords contained in splogs. Since splogs often cause noises in word occurrence statistics in the blogosphere, we assume that we can efficiently collect splogs by sampling blog homepages containing keywords of a certain type on the date with its most frequent occurrence. We manually examine various features of collected blog homepages regarding whether their text content is excerpt from other sources or not, as well as whether they display affiliate advertisement or out-going links to affiliated sites. Among various informative results, it is important to note that more than half of the collected splogs are created by a very small number of spammers.

A sharable software repository for Japanese LVCSR (Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition) is introduced. It is designed as a baseline platform for research and developed by researchers of different academic institutes under a governmental support. The repository consists of a recognition engine (Julius), Japanese acoustic models and statistical language models as well as Japanese morphological analysis tools. These modules can be easily integrated and replaced under a plug-and-play framework, which makes it possible to fairly evaluate components and to develop specific application systems. Assessment of these modules and systems in a 20000-word dictation task is reported. The software repository is freely available to the public., ICSLP2000: the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, October 16-20, 2000, Beijing, China.

The project of Japanese LVCSR (Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition) platform is introduced. It is a collaboration of researchers of different academic institutes and intended to develop a sharable software repository of not only databases but also models and programs. The platform consists of a standard recognition engine, Japanese phone models and Japanese statistical language models. A set of Japanese phone HMMs are trained with ASJ (Acoustic Society of Japan) databases of 20K sentence utterances per each gender. Japanese word N-gram (2-gram and 3-gram) models are constructed with a corpus of Mainichi newspaper of four years. The recognition engine JULIUS is developed for assessment of both acoustic and language models. The modules are integrated as a Japanese LVCSR system and evaluated on 5000-word dictation task. The software repository is available to the public., ICSLP1998: the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, November 30 - December 4, 1998, Sydney, Australia.

Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) is an important basis for the application development of speech recognition technology. We had constructed Japanese common LVCSR speech database and have been developing sharable Japanese LVCSR programs/models by the volunteer-based efforts. We have been engaged in the following two volunteer-based activities. a) IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan) LVCSR speech database working group. b) IPA (Information Technology Promotion Agency) Japanese dictation free software project. IPA Japanese dictation free software project (April 1997 to March 2000) is aiming at building Japanese LVCSR free software/models based on the IPSJ LVCSR speech database (JNAS) and Mainichi newspaper article text corpus. The software repository as the product of the IPA project is available to the public. More than 500 CD-ROMs have been distributed. The performance evaluation was carried out for the simple version, the fast version, and the accurate version in February 2000. The evaluation uses 200 sentence utterances from 46 speakers. The gender-independent HMM models and 20k/60k language models are used for evaluation. The accurate version with the 2000 HMM states and 16 Gaussian mixtures shows 95.9 % word correct rate. The fast version with the phonetic tied mixture HMM and the 1/10 reduced language model shows 92.2 % word correct rate and realtime speed. The CD-ROM with the IPA Japanese dictation free software and its developing workbench will be distributed by the registration to http://www.lang.astem.or.jp/dictation-tk/ or by sending e-mail to dictation-tk-request@astem.or.jp., LREC2000: the 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, May 31 - June 2, 2000, Athens, Greece.