Dialogue Games for Crosslingual Communication

We describe a novel approach to crosslingual dialogue that supports highly accurate communication of semantically complex content between people who do not speak the same language. The approach is introduced through an implemented application that covers the same ground as the chapter of a conventional phrase book for food shopping. We position the approach with respect to dialogue systems and Machine Translation-based approaches to crosslingual dialogue. The current work is offered as a first step towards the innovative use of dialogue theories for the enhancement of human–human dialogue

Intuitive querying of e-Health data repositories

At the centre of the Clinical e-Science Framework (CLEF) project is a repository of well organised, detailed clinical histories, encoded as data that will be available for use in clinical care and in-silico medical experiments. An integral part of the CLEF workbench is a tool to allow biomedical researchers and clinicians to query – in an intuitive way – the repository of patient data. This paper describes the CLEF query editing interface, which makes use of natural language generation techniques in order to alleviate some of the problems generally faced by natural language and graphical query interfaces. The query interface also incorporates an answer renderer that dynamically generates responses in both natural language text and graphics

Towards a generation-based semantic web authoring tool

Widespread use of Semantic Web technologies requires interfaces through which knowledge can be viewed and edited without deep understanding of Description Logic and formalisms like OWL and RDF. Several groups are pursuing approaches based on Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs), so that editing can be performed by typing in sentences which are automatically interpreted as statements in OWL. We suggest here a variant of this approach which relies entirely on Natural Language Generation (NLG), and propose requirements for a system that can reliably generate transparent realisations of statements in Description Logic

Automatic generation of large-scale paraphrases

Research on paraphrase has mostly focussed on lexical or syntactic variation within individual sentences. Our concern is with larger-scale paraphrases, from multiple sentences or paragraphs to entire documents. In this paper we address the problem of generating paraphrases of large chunks of texts. We ground our discussion through a worked example of extending an existing NLG system to accept as input a source text, and to generate a range of fluent semantically-equivalent alternatives, varying not only at the lexical and syntactic levels, but also in document structure and layout

Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay

In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself

Authoring and generation of individualized patient education materials

ABSTRACT Although the pre-surgical patient-surgeon encounter is the opportunity to educate the patient, it is essential that the patient be given educational materials to complement the face-to-face exchange. This is virtually impossible to do well with brochures, because many combinations of procedures are possible, different patients have different concerns, and patients have varying levels of literacy and knowledge. In the extreme, a patient would either be given a set of brochures selected from 100s of variants, or all patients would be given the same set of brochures without regard for differing needs. We have been developing an information brochure generator that customizes material for every individual patient regardless of the complexity of the surgical intervention

Cognitive Program Compiler

Cognitive Programs (CP) specify computational tasks for the executive controller of visual attention. They are built on top of the Selective Tuning (ST) model of attention and its extension, STAR. Currently, the common way of specifying CPs is via diagrams, which are neither standardized nor directly machine-readable. This necessitates tedious and time-consuming implementation of CPs by hand, which slows research and prevents rapid experimentation. This thesis presents the specification and reference implementation of the Cognitive Program Compiler (CPC). The CPC reads tasks written in the Cognitive Program Description (CPD) format, based on a novel controlled natural language called Imperative English (IE). The CPC can then output executable code in a regular programming language. The reference implementation is easily extensible, and several output modules are provided. The CPC output has been evaluated by specifying several real-world psychophysical experiments and comparing the generated code against known human performance for those experiments

Source authoring for multilingual generation of personalised object descriptions

We present the source authoring facilities of a natural language generation system that produces personalised descriptions of objects in multiple natural languages starting from language-independent symbolic information in ontologies and databases as well as pieces of canned text. The system has been tested in applications ranging from museum exhibitions to presentations of computer equipment for sale. We discuss the architecture of the overall system, the resources that the authors manipulate, the functionality of the authoring facilities, the system's personalisation mechanisms, and how they relate to source authoring. A usability evaluation of the authoring facilities is also presented, followed by more recent work on reusing information extracted from existing databases and documents, and supporting the owl ontology specification language