Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.
Example of misunderstanding caused by different interpretations of same pictogram by
age
The research overview is as follows: (1) We collected questionnaire responses
from 276 Japanese mobile phone users in five age groups ranging from teenagers to
those 50 or older. We compiled total of more than 6,600 interpretations and usage
examples for mobile phone pictograms, then analyzed the compiled questionnaire
data to find pictograms with age-specific or gender-specific differences of
interpretation. (2) We then developed a web-based prototype of a pictogram
dictionary application that lets users search and view its more than 6,600 data items
by specifying an age group and/or gender as search conditions. (3) We used web-
based machine translation services provided by Language Grid to create a
multilingual translation service that provides translations of the pictogram
interpretations and usage examples into several languages. To enable this service, we
first created a standard-language correspondence table to convert colloquialisms into
language that could be understood by a machine translation service. Language Grid is
a system that lets users turn existing language resources on the internet into web
services they can freely combine to create new language services [5].
Section 2 describes the questionnaire survey we conducted to investigate age-
specific and gender-specific differences of interpretation of mobile phone pictograms,
and describes the pictograms that had age-specific and gender-specific differences of
interpretation. Section 3 provides an overview of the age-specific pictogram
dictionary application we developed for this research. Section 4 describes the
multilingual translation service we developed for this research. Section 5 describes
the feedback and comments we received. Section 6 is the conclusion.
2 Pictogram Interpretations and Usage Examples
This section provides an overview of our questionnaire survey on pictogram
interpretations, and describes our analysis of the compiled questionnaire results.
