<p>There is a growing need for automatic measurements of language ability. With increase in the aging population, the number of older adults with dementia is expected to increase. Language disorder is considered one of the most fundamental symptom with which dementia can be detected. The identification of language defects particular to dementia symptoms may contribute to the early detection of dementia. Currently, many foreign students learn Japanese at educational institutions, which are required to provide appropriate evaluations to their students. However, differences occur because evaluators judge the language abilities of foreign students subjectively. The measured results from an automatic language ability measurement system could be used for objective evaluations. Although traditional studies manually measured language abilities, such methods are often costly. In this study, we propose the automatic language ability measurement system, "KOTOBAKARI," as an alternative to traditional manual measurement methods. This system is expected to reduce the cost and time of measuring the language ability using the following steps: (1) voice recognition to obtain text data and (2) quantitative indicators for automated language ability measurement. We verify the capacity of voice recognition to measure language ability by comparing language ability to a threshold value and by assessing language ability score changes. The experimental results show that it is difficult to judge language ability by threshold value comparison, using our system. On the contrary, the language ability score of some individuals, measured with our system, was correlated with the correct score. This result indicates that these individuals can use our system to assess language ability changes by continuous measurements. </p>

A concept of "modality" has been proposed in architecture field. "Modality" means the totality of what we are aware of. Information about modality is useful in various situations, such as sightseeing, daily life, and city plan. In order to collect modality-records using information-processing technology, we held the event "100ninmap" that people walk about town. The results revealed three findings: (1) Almost half of collected modal records are location-dependent records. (2) In order to collect modality-records efficiently, the event takes a little ingenuity that keeps someone from being bored. (3) Through the event, we can collect not only information about shopping, eating and drinking but that about daily life, entertainments, and so on.

現在、本邦では13万人を超える外国人留学生が日本語を学んでいる。各日本語教育機関には、留学生の日本語熟達度に対して適切に評価を与えることが求められているが、評価の難易度はその対象によって異なる。選択問題など、問いに対する解が明示的に設けられていることの多い読解や聴解の試験については、その評価が比較的容易であるが、作文課題やスピーチ・テストについては、教師によって評価基準に主観が入る可能性が多分にあり、客観的な評価が非常に困難であるといえる。そこで、本発表では言語能力（語彙量・語彙の特殊性・語彙の難しさなど）を数量的に測定するシステムを紹介し、日本語教育への応用可能性について探る。

Preceding study claims that one's language abilities develop over long period of time and improve with age. On the other hand, some study reports that some parts of language abilities, such as grammatical ability, show some decrease in elder people. Since one's language ability is often shown as the aggregation of multiple human abilities, it is difficult to solely extract his/her language ability out of his/her written texts. This study, thus, analyzes texts by using multiple linguistic measures. The corpora cover school students (children attending primary to junior high school, age 6 to 15 years old), elders (age 50 to over 80 years old), Japanese as the Second Language learners, and a dementia patient (Alzheimer type). As a result, this study shows that the lexical richness decreases, and difficult vocabularies tend to be especially lost from elders. This study also displays the possibility of detecting dementia in its early stage.

Preceding study claims that one's language abilities develop over long period of time and improve with age. On the other hand, some study reports that some parts of language abilities, such as grammatical ability, show some decrease in elder people. Since one's language ability is often shown as the aggregation of multiple human abilities, it is difficult to solely extract his/her language ability out of his/her written texts. This study, thus, analyzes texts by using multiple linguistic measures. The corpora cover school students (children attending primary to junior high school, age 6 to 15 years old), elders (age 50 to over 80 years old), Japanese as the Second Language learners, and a dementia patient (Alzheimer type). As a result, this study shows that the lexical richness decreases, and difficult vocabularies tend to be especially lost from elders. This study also displays the possibility of detecting dementia in its early stage.

Students learn specialist knowledge in basic nursing education through lectures, exercises, and practical training. Textbooks and specialist books are used in lectures to understand the technical terms. However, in practical training, there is an addition of natural language that develops with the cultural background of a nursing facility for daily communications.
In this study, we organized the technical terms related to emergency care and constructed a corpus database of emergency nursing care from nursing textbooks, specialized emergency nursing care books, as well as the nursing students’ practical training records that include natural language descriptions.

The research presented in this paper aims at advancing text readability studies for Japanese and devises a practical and useful system that contributes to Japanese language teaching, learning, and research. More specifically, utilizing leveled corpora mainly consisting of text from textbooks of Japanese, we produced the following formula to measure the readability level of a given text in six scales: X = {mean length of sentence * -0.056} + {proportion of kango * -0.126} + {proportion of wago * -0.042} + {proportion of number of verbs among all words * -0.145} + {proportion of number of auxiliary verbs * -0.044} + 11.724 (R2=.896) . The formula was tested against another set of leveled text in Japanese to prove its reliability. Lastly, the method was implemented in a computer system that calculates and produces the estimated level of a text via a web-based online interface.

The "100-nin Map" is an event held on July 27, 2013. 54 people have participated in this event. They have posted about 2600 messages via a specially developed original application to create a newly generated map. This paper is to compare this original map with existing tourist maps (such as commercially available tourist maps and Twitter visualization based maps) to discuss the potential of collective intelligence.