This paper describes a dialog based QA system, Dialog Navigator, which can answer questions based on large text knowledge base. This system is targeted at users of personal computers. We released the system on the WWW in April 2002. In real world QA systems, vagueness of questions is a big problem. Our system can navigate users to the desired answers using the following methods: asking users back with dialog cards, and description extraction of each retrieved text. Another feature of the system is that it retrieves relevant texts precisely, using question types, synonymous expression dictionary, and modifier-head relations in Japanese sentences.

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This paper reports various kinds of visualization (isosurfaces, pseudo-three-dimensional representations, contour map, and cross sections) on the atomic orbitals of a hydrogen atom using multimedia techniques (animation and still image), and relation to visualization of the wave character by the oscillating circular membrane. These visualizations are very important, because they are suitable methods to understand the character of the atomic orbital wavefunctions. Interactive visualization methods on the wave character of the atomic orbitals of a hydrogen atom were investigated using large capacity and random accessible recording media, i.e., CD-R (Compact Disk Recordable). The wave character of atomic orbitals, such as a node or a nodal surface, was represented by using their classical oscillator in contrast to the atomic orbitals of a hydrogen atom through the interactive operations on a computer.

This paper describes a spoken dialog Q-A system as a substitution for call centers. The system is capable of making dialogs for both fixing speech recognition errors and for clarifying vague questions, based on only large text knowledge base. We introduce two measures to make dialogs for fixing recognition errors. An experimental evaluation shows the advantages of these measures.

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