Special Feature: Navigation Technologies for Next-Truly Innovative Portal Services
Masahiro Oku† and Katsuyoshi Tanabe
Abstract
We have been conducting research and development on core technologies to achieve innovative portal services that will provide interesting and valuable information to a user in the ubiquitous broadband
era.

1. Tasks for portal services
What do you use the Internet
Recognize
Cooperate withfor? People have various different purposes. For example,
SearchParticipate inResearchsome people use it to get up-toBuyDiscoverKnowdate international news or thelatest rumors about celebrities.
Others want to find the locationof an interesting-looking hotspring hotel they saw on TV,
Portal services
want to know what others say
Personabout a product they are thinkInformation
ing of buying, or want to readarticles in blogs (Weblogs) written by people with similar interFig. 1. Various user demands for portal services.
ests. As Fig. 1 shows, portal services are the gateways to suchinformation. They are designed to offer various
he/she will try to look for the desired result by checksearch services to meet various requests. However,ing the huge number of returned search results one by
the current search services are not useful enough toone, which is a very laborious task. Most users justlead users to the information they want if definite
glance at the search results on the first one or two
keywords are unavailable. You may have had thepages and if they cannot find the desired information,
experience of failing to get desired information simthey give up and do not bother to check the remainply because the keywords you came up with were noting results or they try a different approach.
detailed enough.
Figure 2 shows how users get information over theAnother common problem is that too many searchInternet. Users who are very experienced at accessing
results are presented, so it is hard to extract theinformation (information experts) can continuously
desired information from them. If the user has a clear
expand their own “areas that are easy to reach” bypurpose and some idea of the desired information,
adding appropriate keywords based on the feedback
provided by the first search results (i.e., by refining
information in an easy-to-reach area) or by following† NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories
links skillfully to get information from “areas thatYokosuka-shi, 239-0847 Japan
E-mail: oku.masahiro@lab.ntt.co.jp
have useful information but are difficult to reach”
12NTT Technical Review

generation Portal Services

Information experts cancontinuously expand their own
easy-to-reach areas.

Ordinary users have difficulty
expanding their own easy-to-reachareas.

: areas that are easy to reach: areas that have useful information but are difficult to reach: areas after expansion

Fig. 2. How users get information over the Internet (current usage).

2. Technologies for the next-generation portalservices

Fig. 3. How users could get information over the Internet(improvements provided by future portal services).

(see the area expansion arrows in Fig. 2). Unlike
information experts, ordinary users often fail to thinkof appropriate keywords or get lost while following
the links, even if they see the same search results as
the experts. In other words, ordinary users have difficulty in expanding their own easy-to-reach area.
Next-generation portal services should enable as
many users as possible to easily reach the information
they want regardless of their level of information literacy. It is important to expand easy-to-reach areas
while reducing areas that contain useful information
but are difficult to reach by developing navigation
technology to guide users to the information theywant, as shown in Fig. 3.
Vol. 4 No. 8 Aug. 2006

Some examples of information in areas that containuseful information but are difficult to reach are given
below.
(a) Information that users cannot get by the simple
search method:
Information that is difficult to get by simple
keyword search; for example, information that
includes more than one answer (e.g., information
regarding methods or reasons), information thatis discovered while searching with no definite
purpose, information stored in various databases,etc.
(b) Information other than text:
Multimedia information (e.g., images/videos/sounds/music) that is difficult to locate by using
keywords.
(c) Information buried in an enormous amount of
information:
Information that users cannot get by a searchbased approach; for example, information that is
important to only a limited group of users orinformation that is being discussed in a limited
field.
We believe that the new portal technologies shownin Fig. 4 can deal with such information ((a)-(c)) byconnecting information sources and users. Will our13

Special Feature

The Web

For home users

New navigation technologies

Multimedia indexing/retrieval

Userfriendly!
Aha!

Extract indices forhandling video by
multi-modal
estimation

TV and movies

This productlooks
exciting!

Closed captions
Advanced informationextraction technology
is essential to bridge
the digital divide.

Text

Web miningblog○△?
• Conceptual search• Web pageclassification• Ranking reputation

absdhfkfog
cvnhdyf
nxmcjir

mountainNews

Summarization
techniques forlarge-scale
informationE.g.,
macroanalysis
of buzz
fromblogs

Guide eachuser appropriately
For business users
Many complaints madeagainst Company A’sproduct.

summit, gorge, plateau Extract essencefrom a bunchof texts
Intention inference
Apply tobusiness management

Fig. 4. Navigation technologies for next-generation portals.

new portal technologies be accepted by users when
they are put into actual use or will they need to beimproved? It may be that we can answer such questions only after the technologies have been tested byusers in practice. NTT Laboratories offers users anonline site, called “goo Labs” [1], where they canexperience our newest technologies including thenext-generation search technologies. Our portal technologies are being tested there too. The site is used toidentify our future study tasks based on user reactions; their responses allow us to refine the technologies before putting them into commercial use. For
example, the goo multimedia search service [2] forimages, moving pictures, and music is a graduate of“goo Labs”. This service uses a unique search technique developed by NTT. Before putting it into commercial use, we tested it at “goo Labs” about for eightmonths to verify its technical and operational usefulness.
NTT Laboratories is engaged in R&D of technologies that can handle all types of information ((a)-(c)).
Our R&D activities on portal technologies have fourmain themes, which are discussed in more detail in14

the other articles in this Special Feature:(1) Turning online web information into “pearls ofwisdom”
For information that users cannot get by a simple
search method, a navigation-type search system
assists users in finding the information they need in a
number of ways. We are researching and developing
technologies that will enable users to easily reach theinformation they want by arranging and categorizing
a huge volume of information from a different viewpoint from that used in traditional ranking methods.
We are also studying search technologies that enable
users to reach information even though it does notinclude the input keyword but a word with a similar
meaning.
(2) Making the fullest use of broadband
There is no doubt that multimedia information will
become more popular with the proliferation of broadband. Unlike text information, however, multimedia
information is harder to handle. Because multimedia
information requires the system to first indicate theinformation it wants to handle. Based on an analysisof the content of multimedia information, we have
NTT Technical Review

Special Feature

been developing techniques that will enable users tohandle the media depending on the content so thatusers can easily arrange, search, understand, and send
the multimedia information, such as videos, at will.
(3) Giving users an overview of an enormous
amount of information at a glance
Information that is buried in an enormous amountof information cannot be found simply based on thefrequency of appearance. Therefore, we are studying
the latest technique for selecting topics based on how
frequently they appear on websites by category andhow fresh they are, by analyzing blogs and news
websites, etc. We are also studying interface techniques for displaying a large number of keywords andcontents on small screens, such as those used in cellular phones.
(4) Providing services customized for individuals
We need to know what kind of information users
want in order to lead them to it. However, users cannot always specify what information they want.
Therefore, we are now developing technologies thatwill help them achieve their goals by showing them
useful information, such as their behavior history or alist of websites browsed by many users.

3. Future work
Since the Internet market contains many rival companies and we learn by trial and error, it is becoming
essential to shorten the cycle of testing and feedback
provided by “goo Labs” in order to advance our R&D
on a timely basis. The top page of goo Labs on February 28, 2006 is shown in Fig. 5, but by the time youread this article and try and access the URL [1], it willprobably look rather different. We will proactively
test our new technologies at goo Labs to prove theirusefulness and utilize user feedback to refine ourR&D activities.
From the viewpoint of technology development,
we think that we must be really careful about how we
handle information sent by individuals. Due to theexplosive proliferation of blogs and social networking services (SNSs), not only the traditional type of
information or information released by companies
but also information released by individuals is
becoming increasingly common on the Internet.
Information sent by individuals is often of interest toother users, for example, word-of-mouth reports oropinions. Such information can represent useful marketing data for companies and essential information

goo Labs

Multifaceted blog search system“BLOGRANGER”

Newly arrived
information

Push-based topic notification system

Local area information search system

Japanese-language concept search system“Kanshinji Antenna”

goo beta services

Fig. 5. Top page of “goo Labs”.

Vol. 4 No. 8 Aug. 200615

Special Featurefor individuals when buying or making decisions. We
think it is necessary to develop technologies that canorganize, process, and categorize the information
sent by individuals and pass it on. However, it isimportant to keep in mind that information provided
by individuals is sometimes inferior to that fromcompanies in terms of reliability and credibility.
Therefore, we think we need to research and develop
technologies taking into consideration safety and reliability; for example, we need technologies that canevaluate the reliability of information. We will continue development of the next-generation portal services, which will, we believe, satisfy your expectations.

Masahiro Oku
Senior Research Engineer, Supervisor, Media
Computing Project, NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories.
He received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electronic engineering from Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka, in 1982 and 1984, respectively,and the Ph.D. degree in engineering from Niigata University, Niigata, in 2001. In 1984, hejoined the Electrical Communication Laboratories of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public
Corporation (now NTT). Since then, he has been
engaged in R&D of natural language processing,
especially Japanese language processing, such as
analyzing Japanese idiomatic expressions,detecting and correcting Japanese homophoneerrors, and creating automated directory assistance systems. He is now engaged in R&D ofbroadband Internet services, such as multimedia
information retrieval. He is a member of theInstitute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) of Japan, theInformation Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ),
and the Association for Natural Language Processing.

References
Katsuyoshi Tanabe
[1]
[2]

16

http://labs.goo.ne.jp/
http://bsearch.goo.ne.jp/

Senior Research Engineer, Media Computing
Project, NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories.
He received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in informational engineering from Yokohama National
University, Kanagawa, in 1983 and 1985, respectively. He joined NTT Electrical Communication
Laboratories in 1985 and mainly engaged in
R&D of image processing systems, such asimage understanding, similarity measures
between images, similarity image retrieval, andautomatic synthesis of color ocular fundus
images. He is now engaged in R&D of broadband Internet services, such as multimedia information retrieval. He is a member of IEICE, IPSJ,
and the Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers.

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