This exploratory study follows existing theory and analysis of mass media product and its audience analysis. It aims to analyse how audience members utilise a popular anime in Japan for their construction and reconstruction of sense of self, which is referred to as socialisation. Academic research has increasingly shed light on audience members??? socialisation by utilising mass media products in encompassing academic fields such as media studies, communication studies and cultural studies. It is widely agreed that the content of mass media products play a significant role in their socialisation. This study takes up a Japanese anime, Mononoke Hime as a sample case for investigating audience members??? socialization. Through the analysis of reactions of audience members to Mononoke Hime, it will be investigated how audience members interpret the anime reflecting one???s experience in the society relating the experience to the content of Mononoke Hime. It will be clarified that the audience members of the anime construct and reconstruct their sense of self, morals and values in the society, that is, they utilize the anime as a facility for their socialization. The data of this study are collected comments which are compiled in a published magazine and private comments posted on Internet sites. 133 comments in the magazine and 32 comments on Internet sites are selected for the analysis. The data were analysed by two analytical approaches. The first analysis is to see how the consulted viewers established their relationship with the anime, while the second analysis is to see how the viewers depicted and interpreted the content of the anime. This study concluded that the consulted audience members show high level of ideological involvement with the anime; they depict parts of the anime relating to their experience in the real life and talk the anime seriously rather than playfully enjoy it as an entertainment. By analysing the comments of consulted audience members, it is also revealed that the audience members take characters of the anime as a role model both in cross gender and gender based ways.

No description available.

Question answering is a research field with the aim of providing answers to a user’s question, phrased in natural language. In this thesis I explore some techniques used in question answering, working towards the twin goals of using deep linguistic knowledge robustly as well as using language-independent methods wherever possible. While the ultimate aim is cross-language question answering, in this research experiments are conducted over Japanese data, concentrating on factoid questions. The two main focus areas, identified as the two tasks most likely to benefit from linguistic knowledge, are question classification and answer extraction. / In question classification, I investigate the issues involved in the two common methods used for this task—pattern matching and machine learning. I find that even with a small amount of training data (2000 questions), machine learning achieves better classification accuracy than pattern matching with much less effort. The other issue I explore in question classification is the classification accuracy possible with named entity taxonomies of different sizes and shapes. Results demonstrate that, although the accuracy decreases as the taxonomy size increases, the ability to use soft decision making techniques as well as high accuracies achieved in certain classes make larger, hierarchical taxonomies a viable option. / For answer extraction, I use Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics (RMRS) as a sentence representation to determine similarity between questions and answers, and then use this similarity score, along with other information discovered during comparison, to score and rank answer candidates. Results were slightly disappointing, but close examination showed that 40% of errors were due to answer candidate extraction, and the scoring algorithm worked very well. Interestingly, despite the lower accuracy achieved during question classification, the larger named entity taxonomies allowed much better accuracy in answer extraction than the smaller taxonomies.

This thesis examines silence as attributed to and performed by Japanese students in Australian university classrooms. It aims to elucidate processes in which silence can be used and created in intercultural communication in the classroom. The phenomenon of silence is approached from multiple perspectives. The data include interviews, a questionnaire and survey data, classroom observation and video-recorded classroom interactions. The data was collected in Australia and Japan. The Japanese data was included as part of sociocultural contexts where the Japanese students studying in Australia bring with them. The analysis draws on the frameworks of the ethnography of communication and conversation analysis. Micro- and macro- perspectives are combined to investigate how perceptions and performances interact to construct silence in the cross-cultural encounters in these classrooms. The thesis consists of four parts. The first part, Chapters 1-3, sets the theoretical background to the research. Chapter 1 describes how the research was conceived, and states the aims of the research. Chapter 2 reviews literature on silence, with specific attention to silence in Japanese communication and in classroom contexts. In Chapter 3 the methodological framework and design of this research is described. The second part, Chapter 4, examines how Japanese students� silence is perceived, both by themselves and their Australian teachers. The chapter is based on interviews with Japanese students in Australia, as well as findings from a questionnaire distributed to their lecturers. Japanese classroom practices as an aspect of the sociocultural background of Japanese students are also described. Finally, the third part, Chapters 5, 6, 7, compares actual silence and performance in the classroom with perceived silence. There are three case studies which make up a substantial part of the thesis and provide detailed analyses of classroom interactions, based on video-recordings, observations, and follow-up interviews with key participants. Chapter 8 synthesises the findings discussed in Chapters 4-7, and concludes with implications for teaching and learning in the multicultural university classroom.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [695]-707.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 226-235). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1989. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [93]-98).

Thesis (M.A.(St.Art.Hist.)) -- University of Adelaide, Master of Arts (Studies in Art History), School of History and Politics, Discipline of History, 2005. / Coursework. "November 2004" Bibliography: leaves 118-128.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-139).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [329]-337).