Generació semi-automàtica de les preguntes més rellevants dels continguts d'una web docent

Aquest article descriu una eina que facilita la generació de forma semiautomàtica de les preguntes més rellevants, en diferents llengües, relacionades amb un lloc web, i la seva adaptació a webs de cursos universitaris. Concretament, es descriu com s'ha utilitzat per generar preguntes i respostes relatives a l'avaluació de cursos d'introducció a la programació. També s'inclou l'estudi que s'està realitzant per obtenir preguntes que facilitin l'aprenentatge dels conceptes bàsics d'aquests cursos.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Producing Referring Expressions in Dialogue:Insights from a Translation Exercise

This paper discusses some of the challenges which arise in comparing the outputs of an algorithm for generating referring expressions across languages and cultures. The context in which the algorithm is employed and evaluated is a virtual environment, and the referring expressions in question form part of a dialogue script “acted out” by two virtual agents in a furniture shop. This setup was created in order to enable us to assess perceptions of a scene by English- and Japanese-speaking subjects with respect to naturalness of dialogue and behaviour of virtual agents, among other things. We show that the process of translating the dialogues from English into Japanese reveals a variety of contextual factors which need to be taken into account for the generation and evaluation of dialogues to be successful in the target language. We focus on issues related to the use of referring expressions, specially: the utility of different types of attributes in the identification of objects, the realisation of locative expressions, and how to deal with the absence of a distinction between singulars and plurals in Japanese. These issues impact on the design and evaluation of algorithms for generating referring expressions in interactive situations, and call into question the extent to which current algorithms are transferrable between languages and cultures

Generating monologue and dialogue to present personalised medical information to patients

Medical information is notoriously difficult to convey to patients because the content is complex, emotionally sensitive, and hard to explain without recourse to technical terms. We describe a pilot system for communicating the contents of electronic health records (EHRs) to patients. It generates two alternative presentations, which we have compared in a preliminary evaluation study: the first takes the form of a monologue, which elaborates the information taken from the patient’s EHR by adding explanations of some concepts and procedures; the second takes the form of a scripted dialogue, in which the content is recast as a series of questions, answers and statements assigned to two characters in the dialogue, a senior and a junior nurse. Our discourse planning method designs these presentations in tandem, first producing a monologue plan which is then elaborated into a dialogue plan.

Método de conversión de un diálogo controlado a un discurso en UN-Lencep

Resumen: El análisis de requisitos es una etapa del ciclo de vida del software que comprende las tareas de educción, modelado, validación y especificación de los requisitos. Adicionalmente, la especificación de requisitos debe ser correcta, no ambigua, completa, consistente, jerarquizada, verificable, modificable y trazable. Para realizar este proceso se requiere un contacto permanente con el interesado, de forma que toda la información se constate con él. Existen diversas técnicas para obtener la información necesaria para una especificación de requisitos, pero la que más se utiliza es la entrevista, la cual es un diálogo entre el analista y el interesado. Sin embargo, en un diálogo es común encontrar factores que afectan el entendimiento entre los actores. Esto hace que la tarea de obtener la información necesaria del interesado sea una de las más complejas en el proceso de especificación de requisitos. En procura de disminuir la ambigüedad existente en el diálogo, se desarrollaron los lenguajes controlados, que son subconjuntos del lenguaje natural. Los lenguajes controlados poseen una estructura similar al lenguaje natural, con reglas léxicas, reglas gramaticales, signos y palabras. Los lenguajes controlados tienen diversos usos. En la especificación de requisitos de software se encuentra el lenguaje controlado UN-Lencep, que permite presentar el discurso del interesado de una forma que se pueda validar. Adicionalmente, presenta la información de manera concreta, inambigua y completa. Sin embargo, la información se debe obtener mediante el diálogo con el interesado, dejando en manos del analista la identificación de los elementos necesarios para la estructuración del discurso, lo que posibilita la aparición de errores. Para reducir esta problemática, se propone, en esta Tesis, la estructuración de una secuencia ordenada de preguntas y la definición de las reglas necesarias para convertir las respuestas en el discurso del interesado, expresado en UN-Lencep. Adicionalmente, en un prototipo funcional se incluyen estos elementos y se valida con la especificación de algunos proyectos que requieren el desarrollo de una aplicación de software.Abstract: The requirements analysis is a phase of software development life-cycle. It comprises: requirements elicitation, modeling, validation and specification. Also, the requirements specification should be: correct, unambiguous, complete, consistent, hierarchical, verifiable, modifiable, and traceable. This process requires a permanent contact with the stakeholder, in such way that he can verify the information. There are several techniques for obtain information for the requirements specification, but the most used is the interview, which is a dialog between the analyst and the stakeholder. In such dialog the stakeholder has the information about the software domain and the analyst knows how make the software specification. However, some problems arise in dialogs that affect the understanding between their actors. They make most complex the task of requirements specification process, in order to obtain the needed information from the stakeholder. The controlled languages (subsets of natural language) help to decrease the ambiguity in the dialog. The controlled languages have a similar structure to the natural language, with lexical and grammatical rules, signs, and words. The controlled languages have several uses. For the software requirements specification, a controlled language called UN-Lencep is used, for allowing elaboration and validation of the stakeholder discourse. UN-Lencep presents the information in a concrete, unambiguous, and complete way. However, the information must be obtained by using a dialog with the stakeholder, but the analyst must identify the elements of the discourse structure, and this is a possible cause of mistakes in the process. As a way to reduce this problem, we propose, in this Thesis, the organization of an ordered sequence of questions that allow guidance to analyst on the identification of the needed elements for creating the discourse. Also, we establish a set of rules for translating the answers into a UN-Lencep stakeholder discourse. We include these features into a functional prototype, which we use in a lot of projects that needs to develop a software application, so we validate the functionality of all elementsMaestrí