Japan is in the process of developing its own counterparts to ChatGPT, the renowned artificial intelligence chatbot produced by the US-based company OpenAI. ChatGPT gained global recognition less than a year ago, sparking significant interest.
The Japanese government, alongside major technology corporations like NEC, Fujitsu, and SoftBank, is committing substantial financial resources to construct AI systems that utilize the same fundamental technology, referred to as large language models (LLMs). However, these systems are tailored to the Japanese language, as opposed to relying on translations of the English version.
Keisuke Sakaguchi, a specialist in natural language processing at Tohoku University in Japan, explains, “Existing public LLMs, including GPT, perform exceptionally well in English but often face challenges in Japanese due to variations in the alphabet system, limited available data, and other contributing factors.“
In Japan, there is a growing concern that AI systems trained on datasets in other languages struggle to fully comprehend the intricacies of the Japanese language and its culture. Japanese sentence structures differ significantly from English. Consequently, ChatGPT faces the task of translating a Japanese query into English, seeking an answer, and then translating the response back into Japanese.
In contrast to English’s modest 26-letter alphabet, written Japanese employs two sets of 48 basic characters, along with 2,136 commonly used Chinese characters known as kanji. Many kanji have multiple pronunciations, and an additional 50,000 or so rarely-used kanji further compound the language’s complexity. Given this intricate linguistic landscape, it’s unsurprising that ChatGPT encounters difficulties when working with Japanese.
According to Sakaguchi, in the Japanese context, ChatGPT sometimes generates highly uncommon characters that most individuals have never encountered before, resulting in the creation of unusual and unfamiliar words.
Meanwhile, Japanese researchers hold the aspiration that a meticulously crafted, efficient AI chatbot developed within Japan could play a pivotal role in expediting scientific progress and fostering stronger connections between Japan and the global community.
Shotaro Kinoshita, a researcher specializing in medical technology at the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, asserts, “Should a precise Japanese counterpart to ChatGPT emerge, it holds the potential to significantly benefit individuals seeking to learn the Japanese language or engage in research related to Japan. Consequently, this development could yield a positive influence on collaborative international research efforts.“
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