Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Semi-aural Interfaces: Investigating Voice-controlled Aural Flows

To support mobile, eyes-free web browsing, users can listen to ‘playlists’ of web content— aural flows . Interacting with aural flows, however, requires users to select interface buttons, tethering visual attention to the mobile device even when it is unsafe (e.g. while walking). This research extends the interaction with aural flows through simulated voice commands as a way to reduce visual interaction. This paper presents the findings of a study with 20 participants who browsed aural flows either through a visual interface only or by augmenting it with voice commands. Results suggest that using voice commands reduced the time spent looking at the device by half but yielded similar system usability and cognitive effort ratings as using buttons. Overall, the low-cognitive effort engendered by aural flows, regardless of the interaction modality, allowed participants to do more non-instructed (e.g. looking at the surrounding environment) than instructed activities (e.g. focusing on the user interface)

Inventory of ATT system requirements for elderly and disabled drivers and travellers

This Inventory of ATT System Requirements for Elderly and Disabled Drivers and Travellers is the product of the TELSCAN project’s Workpackage 3: Identification and Updating of User Requirements of Elderly and Disabled Travellers. It describes the methods and tools used to identify the needs of elderly and disabled (E&D) travellers. The result of this investigation is a summary of the requirements of elderly and disabled travellers using different modes of transport, including private cars, buses/trams, metros/trains, ships and airplanes. It provides a generic user requirements specification which can guide the design of all transport telematics systems. However, it is important to stress that projects should also capture a more detailed definition of user requirements for their specific application area or system

CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources

CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future. The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU)

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

Transdisciplinary transformative change: an analysis of some best practices and barriers, and the potential of critical social science in getting us there

Biodiversity experts now widely acknowledge that transformative change is best supported through transdisciplinary collaborations. Yet, such collaborations rarely successfully occur in major biodiversity research institutions and those that do rarely achieve the paradigmatic effects they aim to deliver. To gain some insight into this global phenomenon, we surveyed Swiss-based researchers and non-academic stakeholders addressing global change and biodiversity. In this article, we connect our findings to global patterns in transdisciplinary transformative change initiatives (TTCIs) and heuristically divide collaboration barriers into two categories: lack of resources and lack of vital functional elements. Two of the major themes that emerged from this research were the continued difficulties with (1) establishing a common ‘language’, understanding, and goals, and (2) meaningful pluralization of knowledge in transdisciplinary collaborations aimed at addressing global change and biodiversity loss. The former is widely cited in the literature as contributing to the failure of TTCIs in the form of incoherent problem-framing, while the latter is often identified as contributing to the lack of structural transformative change (e.g., paradigmatic shifts) in completed initiatives. Another major theme reflected in TTCI literature was limited time. Moreover, based on our own extensive inter- and transdisciplinary experience, we agree with other experts that there is a persistent lack of understanding of the potential contributions of critical social science (CSS) to TTCIs. We thus argue that enhancing resource availability for TTCIs, especially tools for improving CSS literacy, could save time and support both problem-framing alignment and delivery of the structural/paradigmatic changes we aspire to

An investigation into deviant morphology : issues in the implementation of a deep grammar for Indonesian

This thesis investigates deviant morphology in Indonesian for the implementation of a deep grammar. In particular we focus on the implementation of the verbal suffix -kan. This suffix has been described as having many functions, which alter the kinds of arguments and the number of arguments the verb takes (Dardjowidjojo 1971; Chung 1976; Arka 1993; Vamarasi 1999; Kroeger 2007; Son and Cole 2008). Deep grammars or precision grammars (Butt et al. 1999a; Butt et al. 2003; Bender et al. 2011) have been shown to be useful for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as machine translation and generation (Oepen et al. 2004; Cahill and Riester 2009; Graham 2011), and information extraction (MacKinlay et al. 2012), demonstrating the need for linguistically rich information to aid NLP tasks. Although these linguistically-motivated grammars are invaluable resources to the NLP community, the biggest drawback is the time required for the manual creation and curation of the lexicon. Our work aims to expedite this process by applying methods to assign syntactic information to kan-affixed verbs automatically. The method we employ exploits the hypothesis that semantic similarity is tightly connected with syntactic behaviour (Levin 1993). Our endeavour in automatically acquiring verbal information for an Indonesian deep grammar poses a number of lingustic challenges. First of all Indonesian verbs exhibit voice marking that is characteristic of the subgrouping of its language family. In order to be able to characterise verbal behaviour in Indonesian, we first need to devise a detailed analysis of voice for implementation. Another challenge we face is the claim that all open class words in Indonesian, at least as it is spoken in some varieties (Gil 1994; Gil 2010), cannot linguistically be analysed as being distinct from each other. That is, there is no distiction between nouns, verbs or adjectives in Indonesian, and all word from the open class categories should be analysed uniformly. This poses difficulties in implementing a grammar in a linguistically motivated way, as well discovering syntactic behaviour of verbs, if verbs cannot be distinguished from nouns. As part of our investigation we conduct experiments to verify the need to employ word class categories, and we find that indeed these are linguistically motivated labels in Indonesian. Through our investigation into deviant morphological behaviour, we gain a better characterisation of the morphosyntactic effects of -kan, and we discover that, although Indonesian has been labelled as a language with no open word class distinctions, word classes can be established as being linguistically-motivated