Communicative Strategies And Patterns Of Multimodal Integration In A Speech-to-Speech Translation System

When multilingual communication through a speech-to-speech translation system is supported by multimodal features, e.g. pen-based gestures, the following issues arise concerning the nature of the supported communication: a) to what extend does multilingual communication differ from ‘ordinary’ monolingual communication with respect to the dialogue structure and the communicative strategies used by participants; b) the patterns of integration between speech and gestures. Building on the outcomes of a previous work, we present results from a study aimed at addressing those issues. The initial findings confirm that multilingual communication, and the way in which it is realized by actual systems (e.g., with or without the push-to-talk mode) affects the form and structure of the conversation

Graph-based broad-coverage semantic parsing

Many broad-coverage meaning representations can be characterized as directed graphs, where nodes represent semantic concepts and directed edges represent semantic relations among the concepts. The task of semantic parsing is to generate such a meaning representation from a sentence. It is quite natural to adopt a graph-based approach for parsing, where nodes are identified conditioning on the individual words, and edges are labeled conditioning on the pairs of nodes. However, there are two issues with applying this simple and interpretable graph-based approach for semantic parsing: first, the anchoring of nodes to words can be implicit and non-injective in several formalisms (Oepen et al., 2019, 2020). This means we do not know which nodes should be generated from which individual word and how many of them. Consequently, it makes a probabilistic formulation of the training objective problematical; second, graph-based parsers typically predict edge labels independent from each other. Such an independence assumption, while being sensible from an algorithmic point of view, could limit the expressiveness of statistical modeling. Consequently, it might fail to capture the true distribution of semantic graphs. In this thesis, instead of a pipeline approach to obtain the anchoring, we propose to model the implicit anchoring as a latent variable in a probabilistic model. We induce such a latent variable jointly with the graph-based parser in an end-to-end differentiable training. In particular, we test our method on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing (Banarescu et al., 2013). AMR represents sentence meaning with a directed acyclic graph, where the anchoring of nodes to words is implicit and could be many-to-one. Initially, we propose a rule-based system that circumvents the many-to-one anchoring by combing nodes in some pre-specified subgraphs in AMR and treats the alignment as a latent variable. Next, we remove the need for such a rule-based system by treating both graph segmentation and alignment as latent variables. Still, our graph-based parsers are parameterized by neural modules that require gradient-based optimization. Consequently, training graph-based parsers with our discrete latent variables can be challenging. By combing deep variational inference and differentiable sampling, our models can be trained end-to-end. To overcome the limitation of graph-based parsing and capture interdependency in the output, we further adopt iterative refinement. Starting with an output whose parts are independently predicted, we iteratively refine it conditioning on the previous prediction. We test this method on semantic role labeling (Gildea and Jurafsky, 2000). Semantic role labeling is the task of predicting the predicate-argument structure. In particular, semantic roles between the predicate and its arguments need to be labeled, and those semantic roles are interdependent. Overall, our refinement strategy results in an effective model, outperforming strong factorized baseline models

Seventh Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1993), volume 1

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications and Research Symposium (SOAR) Symposium hosted by NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC) on August 3-5, 1993, and held at JSC Gilruth Recreation Center. SOAR included NASA and USAF programmatic overview, plenary session, panel discussions, panel sessions, and exhibits. It invited technical papers in support of U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Department of Energy, NASA, and USAF programs in the following areas: robotics and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life support, and space maintenance and servicing. SOAR was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations. More than 100 technical papers, 17 exhibits, a plenary session, several panel discussions, and several keynote speeches were included in SOAR '93

An integration framework for managing rich organisational process knowledge

The problem we have addressed in this dissertation is that of designing a pragmatic framework for integrating the synthesis and management of organisational process knowledge which is based on domain-independent AI planning and plan representations. Our solution has focused on a set of framework components which provide methods, tools and representations to accomplish this task.In the framework we address a lifecycle of this knowledge which begins with a methodological approach to acquiring information about the process domain. We show that this initial domain specification can be translated into a common constraint-based model of activity (based on the work of Tate, 1996c and 1996d) which can then be operationalised for use in an AI planner. This model of activity is ontologically underpinned and may be expressed with a flexible and extensible language based on a sorted first-order logic. The model combines perspectives covering both the space of behaviour as well as the space of decisions. Synthesised or modified processes/plans can be translated to and from the common representation in order to support knowledge sharing, visualisation and mixed-initiative interaction.This work united past and present Edinburgh research on planning and infused it with perspectives from design rationale, requirements engineering, and process knowledge sharing. The implementation has been applied to a portfolio of scenarios which include process examples from business, manufacturing, construction and military operations. An archive of this work is available at: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~oplan/cpf

Reasoning with Contexts in Description Logics

Harmelen, F.A.H. van [Promotor]Schlobach, K.S. [Copromotor

MULTIMODALITY IN COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

2002/2003XVI Ciclo1974Versione digitalizzata della tesi di dottorato cartacea

A framework for the analysis and evaluation of enterprise models

Bibliography: leaves 264-288.The purpose of this study is the development and validation of a comprehensive framework for the analysis and evaluation of enterprise models. The study starts with an extensive literature review of modelling concepts and an overview of the various reference disciplines concerned with enterprise modelling. This overview is more extensive than usual in order to accommodate readers from different backgrounds. The proposed framework is based on the distinction between the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic model aspects and populated with evaluation criteria drawn from an extensive literature survey. In order to operationalize and empirically validate the framework, an exhaustive survey of enterprise models was conducted. From this survey, an XML database of more than twenty relatively large, publicly available enterprise models was constructed. A strong emphasis was placed on the interdisciplinary nature of this database and models were drawn from ontology research, linguistics, analysis patterns as well as the traditional fields of data modelling, data warehousing and enterprise systems. The resultant database forms the test bed for the detailed framework-based analysis and its public availability should constitute a useful contribution to the modelling research community. The bulk of the research is dedicated to implementing and validating specific analysis techniques to quantify the various model evaluation criteria of the framework. The aim for each of the analysis techniques is that it can, where possible, be automated and generalised to other modelling domains. The syntactic measures and analysis techniques originate largely from the disciplines of systems engineering, graph theory and computer science. Various metrics to measure model hierarchy, architecture and complexity are tested and discussed. It is found that many are not particularly useful or valid for enterprise models. Hence some new measures are proposed to assist with model visualization and an original "model signature" consisting of three key metrics is proposed.Perhaps the most significant contribution ofthe research lies in the development and validation of a significant number of semantic analysis techniques, drawing heavily on current developments in lexicography, linguistics and ontology research. Some novel and interesting techniques are proposed to measure, inter alia, domain coverage, model genericity, quality of documentation, perspicuity and model similarity. Especially model similarity is explored in depth by means of various similarity and clustering algorithms as well as ways to visualize the similarity between models. Finally, a number of pragmatic analyses techniques are applied to the models. These include face validity, degree of use, authority of model author, availability, cost, flexibility, adaptability, model currency, maturity and degree of support. This analysis relies mostly on the searching for and ranking of certain specific information details, often involving a degree of subjective interpretation, although more specific quantitative procedures are suggested for some of the criteria. To aid future researchers, a separate chapter lists some promising analysis techniques that were investigated but found to be problematic from methodological perspective. More interestingly, this chapter also presents a very strong conceptual case on how the proposed framework and the analysis techniques associated vrith its various criteria can be applied to many other information systems research areas. The case is presented on the grounds of the underlying isomorphism between the various research areas and illustrated by suggesting the application of the framework to evaluate web sites, algorithms, software applications, programming languages, system development methodologies and user interfaces

Exploring a Modelling Method with Semantic Link Network and Resource Space Model

To model the complex reality, it is necessary to develop a powerful semantic model. A rational approach is to integrate a relational view and a multi-dimensional view of reality. The Semantic Link Network (SLN) is a semantic model based on a relational view and the Resource Space Model (RSM) is a multi-dimensional view for managing, sharing and specifying versatile resources with a universal resource observation. The motivation of this research consists of four aspects: (1) verify the roles of Semantic Link Network and the Resource Space Model in effectively managing various types of resources, (2) demonstrate the advantages of the Resource Space Model and Semantic Link Network, (3) uncover the rules through applications, and (4) generalize a methodology for modelling complex reality and managing various resources. The main contribution of this work consists of the following aspects: 1. A new text summarization method is proposed by segmenting a document into clauses based on semantic discourse relations and ranking and extracting the informative clauses according to their relations and roles. The Resource Space Model benefits from using semantic link network, ranking techniques and language characteristics. Compared with other summarization approaches, the proposed approach based on semantic relations achieves a higher recall score. Three implications are obtained from this research. 2. An SLN-based model for recommending research collaboration is proposed by extracting a semantic link network of different types of semantic nodes and different types of semantic links from scientific publications. Experiments on three data sets of scientific publications show that the model achieves a good performance in predicting future collaborators. This research further unveils that different semantic links play different roles in representing texts. 3. A multi-dimensional method for managing software engineering processes is developed. Software engineering processes are mapped into multiple dimensions for supporting analysis, development and maintenance of software systems. It can be used to uniformly classify and manage software methods and models through multiple dimensions so that software systems can be developed with appropriate methods. Interfaces for visualizing Resource Space Model are developed to support the proposed method by keeping the consistency among interface, the structure of model and faceted navigation

Formal concept matching and reinforcement learning in adaptive information retrieval

The superiority of the human brain in information retrieval (IR) tasks seems to come firstly from its ability to read and understand the concepts, ideas or meanings central to documents, in order to reason out the usefulness of documents to information needs, and secondly from its ability to learn from experience and be adaptive to the environment. In this work we attempt to incorporate these properties into the development of an IR model to improve document retrieval. We investigate the applicability of concept lattices, which are based on the theory of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), to the representation of documents. This allows the use of more elegant representation units, as opposed to keywords, in order to better capture concepts/ideas expressed in natural language text. We also investigate the use of a reinforcement leaming strategy to learn and improve document representations, based on the information present in query statements and user relevance feedback. Features or concepts of each document/query, formulated using FCA, are weighted separately with respect to the documents they are in, and organised into separate concept lattices according to a subsumption relation. Furthen-nore, each concept lattice is encoded in a two-layer neural network structure known as a Bidirectional Associative Memory (BAM), for efficient manipulation of the concepts in the lattice representation. This avoids implementation drawbacks faced by other FCA-based approaches. Retrieval of a document for an information need is based on concept matching between concept lattice representations of a document and a query. The learning strategy works by making the similarity of relevant documents stronger and non-relevant documents weaker for each query, depending on the relevance judgements of the users on retrieved documents. Our approach is radically different to existing FCA-based approaches in the following respects: concept formulation; weight assignment to object-attribute pairs; the representation of each document in a separate concept lattice; and encoding concept lattices in BAM structures. Furthermore, in contrast to the traditional relevance feedback mechanism, our learning strategy makes use of relevance feedback information to enhance document representations, thus making the document representations dynamic and adaptive to the user interactions. The results obtained on the CISI, CACM and ASLIB Cranfield collections are presented and compared with published results. In particular, the performance of the system is shown to improve significantly as the system learns from experience.The School of Computing, University of Plymouth, UK