Revealing the Modern History of Japanese Philosophy Using Digitization, Natural Language Processing, and Visualization

Abstract

This study proposes a framework to access to the modern history of Japanese philosophy using natural language processing (NLP) and visualization. In order to discover new knowledge from massive amounts of information, support of information technologies is required. For supporting knowledge discovery from vast amount of books, we developed an OCR-based automatic book-digitizing framework and the system visualizing documents with relationships among them calculated by using NLP techniques. We applied the framework to Japanese journal Shisō (“Thought”) by the Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten. We show an example of knowledge structure extracted from Shisō by using our visualizing system.