Analysis of Cultural Differences in Pictogram Interpretations

The goal of this thesis is to present one concrete example of how a system can interpret and handle cultural differences in human-provided interpretations. In doing so, this thesis utilizes pictograms, a well-known iconic medium of communication which contains both the implicit cultural interpretations as well as explicit semantic interpretations. Cross-cultural pictogram interpretations are collected in two countries using a web survey, and the characteristics of pictogram interpretations are first analyzed. Based on the analyses, we identify three issues that need to be tackled to handle cultural differences in human-provided interpretations. The three issues are transformed into the following three actionable tasks: 1. A method of handling semantic ambiguity in pictogram interpretations is devised. Participants at both end of the communication channel must share common pictogram interpretation to communicate. However, because pictogram interpretation can be ambiguous, conveying intended meaning with a pictogram sometimes can be difficult. To assist human task of selecting pictograms more likely to be interpreted as intended, we propose a semantic relevance measure which calculates how relevant a pictogram is to a given interpretation. The proposed measure calculates the similarity measurement of two words in a pictogram set and the probability of each interpretation word in a given pictogram using pictogram interpretations and ratios gathered from a web survey. Then the proposed measure is applied to a pictogram retrieval