Research Seminar - February 08, 1999

Abstract

In human communication, differences in culture or background knowledge make it difficult for the recipient to understand correctly the communicator's intention. This seminar tries to analyse why the Japanese are inscrutable by introducing study reports on the Japanese conversation custom statistic, the Zen philosophy ranking the verbal message low, and a medical study of the Japanese speaking people's brain. How to improve the communication quality is discussed, and three approaches are evaluated: computer communication media under the globally common definitions of functions, associated information retrieval methods to detect background knowledge differences, and a quality guide file of the Internet web information. Also, it is pointed out that the human used and will use two types of messages: one aims to be understood universally, and the other to be understood only be some restricted set of people.