Hiroyuki Egashira’s research while affiliated with Saga University and other places

We have designed and implemented a PC operation support system for a physically disabled person with a speech impediment via voice. Voice operation is an effective method for a physically disabled person with involuntary movement of the limbs and the head. We have applied a commercial speech recognition engine to develop our system for practical purposes. Adoption of a commercial engine reduces development cost and will contribute to make our system useful to another speech impediment people. We have customized commercial speech recognition engine so that it can recognize the utterance of a person with a speech impediment. We have restricted the words that the recognition engine recognizes and separated a target words from similar words in pronunciation to avoid misrecognition. Huge number of words registered in commercial speech recognition engines cause frequent misrecognition for speech impediments' utterance, because their utterance is not clear and unstable. We have solved this problem by narrowing the choice of input down in a small number and also by registering their ambiguous pronunciations in addition to the original ones. To realize all character inputs and all PC operation with a small number of words, we have designed multiple input modes with categorized dictionaries and have introduced two-step input in each mode except numeral input to enable correct operation with small number of words. The system we have developed is in practical level. The first author of this paper is physically disabled with a speech impediment. He has been able not only character input into PC but also to operate Windows system smoothly by using this system. He uses this system in his daily life. This paper is written by him with this system. At present, the speech recognition is customized to him. It is, however, possible to customize for other users by changing words and registering new pronunciation according to each user's utterance.

This paper describes design and implementation of multiplication table learning support system with spoken dialogue. Our system provides multi-modal interface for learning. It has speech synthesis engine for speaking to a child (learner) and speech recognition engine to recognize learner's voice responses. Multiple sensitive organs are used in learning, looking at the display (by eyes), listening the voice of the system and their own (by ears) and speaking (by mouth). Our system is designed in investigating learning activities in an elementary school and implemented in accordance with the progress (phase of comprehension) of each study. We define the following three modes according to learning phases. They are a memorize mode, a practice mode and a test mode. To achieve quick recognition and high recognition rate, we constrain vocabulary and syntax the system accepts, and we also extend vocabulary to recognize multiplication table specific numeration.

In this project, technical high school students try to develop tele-control systems such as robot, an electronic fan, small model house and so on over the IPv6 environment. During the project, the students can touch and explore one of the latest technologies. All students looked interested in IPv6. We believe the technical high school students are expected to play important role in the coming ubiquitous stage. Our project demonstrates an example of education to establish ubiquitous world.

Interfaces for handwritten inputs are expected to be useful as means by which a student can use natural handwritten inputs in an intelligent tutoring system. Intelligent tutoring systems operating on the WWW have been developed with the input interfaces of the mouse and keyboard. The authors have developed HandChaRM-WWW, which is a module performing handwritten character recognition on the WWW. The module is written in Java and installed on a WWW client such that no communication delay occurs during character recognition. The characters recognized are limited to numbers, operators, the equal sign, and the like, and handwritten character recognition is realized by extracting characters with high speed and high accuracy. WWW FRONTIER has been developed by implementing HandChaRM-WWW on an intelligent CAI system which guides fractional calculations. WWW FRONTIER is a drill-type intelligent tutoring system which responds to a student by giving a fractional adding or subtracting problem. A student can input a fractional equation on the WWW in handwritten form. A handwritten character recognition rate of 93% has been obtained in evaluation experiments, which constitutes a practical level. The architecture of HandChaRM-WWW is considered to be effective in intelligent tutoring systems for other domains which have characters as targets of recognition. © 2002 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 33(2): 12–21, 2002