This paper proposes a new UGC-oriented language technology application, which we call experience mining. Experience mining aims at automatically collecting instances of personal experiences as well as opinions from an explosive number of user generated contents (UGCs) such as weblog and forum posts and storing them in an experience database with semantically rich indices. After arguing the technical issues of this new task, we focus on the central problem, factuality analysis, among others and propose a machine learning-based solution as well as the task definition itself. Our empirical evaluation indicates that our factuality analysis task is sufficiently well-defined to achieve a high inter-annotator agreement and our Factorial CRF-based model considerably outperforms the baseline. We also present an application system, which currently stores over 50M experience instances extracted from 150M Japanese blog posts with semantic indices and is scheduled to start serving as an experience search engine for unrestricted users in October.

Addressing the task of acquiring semantic relations between events from a large corpus, we first argue the complementarity between the pattern-based relation-oriented approach and the anchor-based argumentoriented approach. We then propose a twophased approach, which first uses lexicosyntactic patterns to acquire predicate pairs and then uses two types of anchors to identify shared arguments. The present results of our empirical evaluation on a large-scale Japanese Web corpus have shown that (a) the anchor-based filtering extensively improves the accuracy of predicate pair acquisition, (b) the two types of anchors are almost equally contributive and combining them improves recall without losing accuracy, and (c) the anchor-based method also achieves high accuracy in shared argument identification.

Aiming at acquiring semantic relations between events from a large corpus, this paper proposes several extensions to a state-of-the-art method originally designed for entity relation extraction. First, expressions of events are defined to specify the class of the acquisition task. Second, the templates of co-occurrence patterns are extended so that they can capture semantic relations between event mentions. Experiments on a Japanese Web corpus show that (a) there are indeed specific co-occurrence patterns useful for event relation acquisition, and (b) For action-effect relation, at least five thousand relation instances are acquired from a 500M-sentence Web corpus with a precision of about 66%.

Twitter is the most famous on-line microblogging service now. People can post (tweet) what they are doing in 140 characters. Since Twitter posts (tweets) reflect what people are looking, hearing, feeling and so on, we can obtain information about Real-world phenomena through the large amount of tweets. In other words, Twitter can be regarded as a sensor of Real-world phenomena including natural phenomena such as hay fever. This motivated us to investigate whether can Twitter be an alternative of Real-world Sensor. In this paper, we first describe about our system which collects and analyzes tweets in order to generates a hay fever map just like as a weather report map. There are some difficulties such as location estimation and normalization of number of tweets. Using the output of the system, we discuss the comparison with actual pollen data gathered by real sensors. The result shows that Twitter can reflect natural phenomena in some particular areas.

Background: To treat diseases caused by genetic variants, it is necessary to identify disease-causing variants in patients. However, since there are a large number of disease-causing variants, the application of AI is required. We propose AI to solve this problem and report the results of its application in identifying disease-causing variants. Methods: To assist physicians in their task of identifying disease-causing variants, we propose an explainable AI (XAI) that combines high estimation accuracy with explainability using a knowledge graph. We integrated databases for genomic medicine and constructed a large knowledge graph that was used to achieve the XAI. Results: We compared our XAI with random forests and decision trees. Conclusion: We propose an XAI that uses knowledge graphs for explanation. The proposed method achieves high estimation performance and explainability. This will support the promotion of genomic medicine.