Language Grid Playground: Intercultural Collaboration Environment Using Light Weight Building Blocks

Abstract

Various types of intercultural collaboration tasks are carried out in the fields of education, medical care, and so on. Members in such fields need support customized for each field. Intercultural collaboration tools, therefore, should allow customization to suit diverse tasks and circumstances. Since tools provided by existing portal sites cannot be customized, they fail to meet the needs of various fields. Therefore, we have developed the Language Grid Playground, an intercultural collaboration environment, which enables easy creation of customized tools. The basic idea of the Playground is to organize language services in a layered architecture and to develop light weight building blocks that form collaboration tools by combining services. In fact, we 1) accumulated and classified useful components for language tools and 2) identified what kinds of language service components will be useful by implementing several tools, developed these components as programs which can be deployed as web services and published them. The Language Grid Playground, which is an aggregate of components, enables easy creation of customized tools. As a practical example, we implemented a customized multilingual chat tool and deployed it to a real-world classroom in just 6 man-weeks. This shows the efficiency of our approach for developing tools.