A Factoid Question Answering System for Vietnamese

In this paper, we describe the development of an end-to-end factoid question answering system for the Vietnamese language. This system combines both statistical models and ontology-based methods in a chain of processing modules to provide high-quality mappings from natural language text to entities. We present the challenges in the development of such an intelligent user interface for an isolating language like Vietnamese and show that techniques developed for inflectional languages cannot be applied "as is". Our question answering system can answer a wide range of general knowledge questions with promising accuracy on a test set.Comment: In the proceedings of the HQA'18 workshop, The Web Conference Companion, Lyon, Franc

Ripple Down Rules for Question Answering

Recent years have witnessed a new trend of building ontology-based question answering systems. These systems use semantic web information to produce more precise answers to users' queries. However, these systems are mostly designed for English. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based question answering system named KbQAS which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one made for Vietnamese. KbQAS employs our question analysis approach that systematically constructs a knowledge base of grammar rules to convert each input question into an intermediate representation element. KbQAS then takes the intermediate representation element with respect to a target ontology and applies concept-matching techniques to return an answer. On a wide range of Vietnamese questions, experimental results show that the performance of KbQAS is promising with accuracies of 84.1% and 82.4% for analyzing input questions and retrieving output answers, respectively. Furthermore, our question analysis approach can easily be applied to new domains and new languages, thus saving time and human effort.Comment: V1: 21 pages, 7 figures, 10 tables. V2: 8 figures, 10 tables; shorten section 2; change sections 4.3 and 5.1.2. V3: Accepted for publication in the Semantic Web journal. V4 (Author's manuscript): camera ready version, available from the Semantic Web journal at http://www.semantic-web-journal.ne

Building lexical resources: towards programmable contributive platforms

International audienceLexical resources are very important in nowadays society, with the globalization and the increase of world communi- cation and exchanges. There are clearly identified needs, both for humans and machines. Nevertheless, very few efforts are actually done in this domain. Consequently, there is an important lack of freely available good quality resources, especially for under- resourced languages. Furthermore, the majority of existing bilin- gual dictionaries is built with one language as English. Therefore, if one wants to translate from one language (that is not English) to another, it uses English as a pivot. And even for English native speakers, it creates a lot of misunderstandings that can be critical in many situations. In order to create and extend freely available good quality rich lexical resources for under-resourced languages online with a community of voluntary contributors, Jibiki, an online generic platform for managing (lookup, editing, import, export) any kind of lexical resources encoded in XML, has been developed. This platform is successfully used in several dictionary construction projects. Concerning the data, a serious game has been launched in order to collect precious lexical information such as collocations that will be integrated later into dictionary entries. Work is now done on extending our platform in order to reuse the resulting resources and enriching them by synchronization with the other systems (language learners and translators environments, machine translation systems, etc.)

MotÀMot project: building a multilingual lexical system via bilingual dictionaries

International audienceThe MotAMot project aims to develop of a multilingual lexi- cal network focused on languages of Southeast Asia and espe- cially Vietnamese and Khmer. The macrostructure is a pivot structure with a monolingual volume for every language and a pivot one connecting each word sense of each monolingual volume. The microstructure is based on the explanatory and combinatorial lexicography. Contributions will be made on- line on the Jibiki platform by a community of volunteers con- stituted around serious games lexical. Each entry will be given a level of quality,as well as for each contributor

The software for oceanographic data management: VODC for PC 2.0

To manage and process a large amount of oceanographic data, users must have powerful tools that simplify these tasks. The VODC for PC is software designed to assist in managing oceanographic data. It based on 32 bits Windows operation system and used Microsoft Access database management system. With VODC for PC users can update data simply, convert to some international data formats, combine some VODC databases to one, calculate average, min, max fields for some types of data, check for valid data

Economic factors influencing zoonotic disease dynamics: demand for poultry meat and seasonal transmission of avian influenza in Vietnam

While climate is often presented as a key factor influencing the seasonality of diseases, the importance of anthropogenic factors is less commonly evaluated. Using a combination of methods-wavelet analysis, economic analysis, statistical and disease transmission modelling-we aimed to explore the influence of climatic and economic factors on the seasonality of H5N1 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in the domestic poultry population of Vietnam. We found that while climatic variables are associated with seasonal variation in the incidence of avian influenza outbreaks in the North of the country, this is not the case in the Centre and the South. In contrast, temporal patterns of H5N1 incidence are similar across these 3 regions: periods of high H5N1 incidence coincide with Lunar New Year festival, occurring in January-February, in the 3 climatic regions for 5 out of the 8 study years. Yet, daily poultry meat consumption drastically increases during Lunar New Year festival throughout the country. To meet this rise in demand, poultry production and trade are expected to peak around the festival period, promoting viral spread, which we demonstrated using a stochastic disease transmission model. This study illustrates the way in which economic factors may influence the dynamics of livestock pathogens

Framework for a spatial Decision Support Tool for policy and decision making

The main challenge of developing of a spatial DST (Decision Support Tool) to support the decision making on future livestock production will not be a technical one, but instead a challenge of meeting the con-text requirements of the tool, such as the characteristics of the country-specific spatial plan-ning and decision-making process, the wishes of the potential users of the tool and its output as well as the country-specific policies and regulations. The spatial DST which is being pro-posed in this report therefore does not include complex and state-of-the-art GIS techniques, but instead tries to be as clear and simple as possible, in order to give the potential users a full understanding during the analysis process and with using the output of the tool. A spatial DST can easily become a ‘black box’ if the users do not fully understand the limita-tions of the tool and its output. Despite the fact that output maps of GIS systems may look very detailed and suggest a high degree of accuracy, they are often not. This will entirely de-pend on the availability of reliable and detailed input data. Most likely, many of the produced output maps should be used in an indicative way only. Therefore, the output of the spatial DST needs to be accompanied by supporting information on the reliability of the output and the shortcomings due to unreliable or missing input data, as well as the consequences for use of the output. Therefore, a comprehensive meta-data assessment system is proposed as an in-tegrated part of the spatial DST. The distribution of the output will also require tools to pro-duce more sketch-like presentations, e.g. using fuzzy borders and aggregated maps, which are another important feature of the spatial DST

Design and Implementation of Text To Speech Conversion for Visually Impaired People

A Text-to-speech synthesizer is an application that converts text into spoken word, by analyzing and processing the text using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and then using Digital Signal Processing (DSP) technology to convert this processed text into synthesized speech representation of the text. Here, we developed a useful text-to-speech synthesizer in the form of a simple application that converts inputted text into synthesized speech and reads out to the user which can then be saved as an mp3.file. The development of a text to speech synthesizer will be of great help to people with visual impairment and make making through large volume of text easie