Here, we describe the development of a mammalian protein-protein interaction (PPI) database and of a PPI Viewer application to display protein interaction networks (http://fantom21.gsc.riken.go.jp/PPI/). In the database, we stored the mammalian PPIs identified through our PPI assays (internal PPIs), as well as those we extracted and processed (external PPIs) from publicly available data sources, the DIP and BIND databases and MEDLINE abstracts by using FACTS, a new functional inference and curation system. We integrated the internal and external PPIs into the PPI database, which is linked to the main FANTOM2 viewer. In addition, we incorporated into the PPI Viewer information regarding the luciferase reporter activity of internal PPIs and the data confidence of external PPIs; these data enable visualization and evaluation of the reliability of each interaction. Using the described system, we successfully identified several interactions of biological significance. Therefore, the PPI Viewer is a useful tool for exploring FANTOM2 clone-related protein interactions and their potential effects on signaling and cellular communication.[The protein-protein interaction data that have been derived from our experiments and are newly described in this paper have been submitted to the BIND database.]

No abstract

This paper describes the syntactic rules which are applied in the Japanese speech recognition module of a speech-to-speech translation system. Japanese is considered to be a free word/phrase order language. Since syntactic rules are applied as constraints to reduce the search space in speech recognition, applying rules which take into account all possible phrase orders can have almost the same effect as using no constraints. Instead, we take into consideration the recognition weaknesses of certain syntactic categories and treat them precisely, so that a miuimal number of rules can work most effectively. In this paper we first examine which syntactic categories are easily misrecognized. Second, we consult our dialogue corpus, in order to provide the rules with great generality. Based ou both stndies, we refine the rules. Finally, we verify the validity of the refinement through speech recognition experiments. 1 Formal noun~ : keishiki-meishi in Japanese. Conjunctive postpositions : setsuzoku-joshi in Japanese.

No abstract

In spontaneous speech understanding a sophisticated integration of speech recognition and language processing is espceially crucial. However, the two modnles are traditionally designed independently, with independent linguistie rules. In Japanese spc.ech recognition the bunsctsu phrase is the basic processing unit and in language processing the sentence is the basic unit. This difference has made it impracticM to use a unique set of linguistic rules for both types of processing. Further, spontaneous speech contains unexpected utterances other than wellformed sentences, while lingnistic rules for both speech and language processing expect well-formed sentences. They therefore fail to process everyday spoken language. To bridge the gap between speech and language processing, we propose that pauses be treated as phrase demarcators and that the interpausal phrase be the basic common processing unit. And to treat the linguistic l)henoI~lena of spoken language properly, we survey relevant features in spontaneous speech data. We then examine the effect of integrating pausal and spontaneous speech phenomena into synt~tctic rules for speech recognition, using 118 sentences. Our experiments show that incorporating pansal phenomena as purely syntactic constraints degrades recognition accuracy considerably, while the additional degradation is minor if some filrther spontaneous speech features are also incorporated.