Preface

This book is a collection of chapters describing research examples and empirical studies on recent intelligent information processing systems and their applications, especially nursing robots, which will become increasingly important in the future. It can be said that the intelligent information processing systems envisioned in artificial intelligence (AI) research aim to "process things more intelligently, smartly, and humanely," a step forward from the information processing systems'goal of "processing things quickly and reliably." In addition, "human-like" processing also means making the mistakes humans tend to make, so there is room for debate about how human-like it should be. Knowledge information processing, especially information retrieval, personalization in the recommendation, intelligent dialogue processing, emotional information processing, and so on, are topics that many researchers have been working on using various approaches. These have influenced the recent rapid development of AI technology. One urgent task is to combine these mature information processing technologies and realize interactive nursing care robots to solve the shortage of caregivers caused by the declining birthrate and aging population, which has become a social problem.

The first section contains two chapters on numerical mining techniques and personalization in information processing systems.

Chapter 1 is a survey of recent mining literature on how to handle numerical information in text mining techniques. Although many methods have been proposed for retrieving textual information, retrieval based on numerical values that consider units, scales, and so on, has not been conducted in conventional text mining research for language. While it is necessary to organize and store numerical values in a database, tabular data on the Web are not always described in a uniform format, and it is necessary to combine text mining techniques.

Chapter 2 describes a research case study of a web service system that makes personal adaptations according to user interactions. To obtain the necessary information on the Web, the user's own characteristics must be fully considered. In this context, a service composition approach that enables dynamic service composition aimed at satisfying user needs based on ontology and user profile information, and a personalization approach that enables service reuse based on user context, are proposed.

The second section contains two chapters on techniques essential to developing AI, such as associative techniques, common sense judgment, and emotional information processing.

Chapter 3 describes the usefulness of associative knowledge techniques, which will be important in realizing the next generation of AI.

Chapter 4 presents experiments with real data on a method that integrates machine learning using corpus-based examples and syntactic knowledge using deep learning techniques. The results show that lexical knowledge is also important to compensate for the insufficient amount of data.

The third section contains two chapters on robotics research in nursing care.

Chapter 5 explores the challenges of developing humanoid robot conversational dialogues for nursing, especially caregiving, and discusses the introduction of robots into clinical practice. It identifies the main issue that needs improvement, that of the robot's speech (intonation, vocal range, speech rate, etc.).

Chapter 6 is a survey of the effectiveness of robot therapy in improving symptoms of dementia patients and a case study by the authors.

The fourth section contains chapters that examine ways to realize the intelligence that will need to be provided to humanoid nursing robots and the potential ethical dilemma of introducing humanoid nursing robots into the medical field from the perspective of nurses.

Chapter 7 describes the nursing situation in Japan, PsyNACS as a specialized nursing database, future nursing robots, and an evolving artificial brain that links PsyNACS with AI using deep learning and natural language processing (NLP). Chapter 8 discusses the ethical dilemma of introducing robots into nursing from multiple perspectives and, with regards to the process of developing robots, states the importance of discussion and collaboration with interdisciplinary teams to protect patient rights and maintain safety.

> **Kazuyuki Matsumoto** Tokushima University, Graduate School of Technology, Industrial and Social Sciences, Tokushima, Japan

Section 1
