Generating Multilingual Personalized Descriptions of Museum Exhibits - The M-PIRO Project

This paper provides an overall presentation of the M-PIRO project. M-PIRO is developing technology that will allow museums to generate automatically textual or spoken descriptions of exhibits for collections available over the Web or in virtual reality environments. The descriptions are generated in several languages from information in a language-independent database and small fragments of text, and they can be tailored according to the backgrounds of the users, their ages, and their previous interaction with the system. An authoring tool allows museum curators to update the system's database and to control the language and content of the resulting descriptions. Although the project is still in progress, a Web-based demonstrator that supports English, Greek and Italian is already available, and it is used throughout the paper to highlight the capabilities of the emerging technology.Comment: 15 pages. Presented at the 29th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Gotland, Sweden, 2001. A version of the paper with higher quality images can be downloaded from: http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/~ionandr/caa_paper.pd

A New Multilingual Authoring Tool of Semistructured Legal Documents

 Los enfoques actuales de gestión de la documentación multilingüe hacen uso de la traducción humana, la traducción automática (TA) y la traducción asistida por ordenador (TAO) para producir versiones de un solo documento en variosidiomas. Sin embargo, losrecientes avances en generación de lenguaje natural (GLN) indican que es posible implementarsistemas independientes del lenguaje a fin de producir documentos en variosidiomas, independientes de una lengua origen, de forma más eficiente y rentable. En este artículo presentamos GenTur —una herramienta de ayuda a la redacción para producir contratosturísticos en variosidiomas. Se prestará especial atención a dos elementos básicos de su implementación: por un lado, la interlengua xgtling usada para la representación discursiva de los contratos, y por otro lado, el desarrollo de una arquitectura que permita a la citada interlengua generar contratosturísticos por medio del algoritmo de generación GT-Mth

Language engineering - a champion for European culture

Language is key to culture. It is a direct cultural medium as well as a means of recording and providing access to non-lingual elements of culture. Language is also fundamental to a sense of cultural identity. For this reason, it is vital, in a changing Europe, that we preserve the multi-lingual character of our society in order to move successfully towards closer co-operation at a political, economic, and social level. Language engineering is the application of knowledge of language to the development of computer software which can recognise, understand, interpret, and generate human language in all its forms. The paper provides a high level view of the ‘state of the art’ in language engineering and indicates ways in which it will have a profound impact on our culture in the future. It shows how advances in language engineering are an important aid in maintaining cultural diversity in a multi-lingual European society, while enabling the development of social cohesion across cultural and national divides. It addresses issues raised by the prospect of the Multi-lingual Information Society, including education, human communication with technology and information management, as well as aspects of digital cities such as tele-presence in digital libraries, virtual art galleries and electronic museums. The paper raises the issue of language as a factor in cultural domination, showing the contribution that language engineering can make towards countering it. The paper also raises a number of controversial issues concerning the likely benefits arising from the ways in which language is likely to influence the culture of Europe

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

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

Chapter Bibliography

authored support system; contextual machine translation; controlled document authoring; controlled language; document structure; terminology management; translation technology; usability evaluatio

Learning to Order Facts for Discourse Planning in Natural Language Generation

This paper presents a machine learning approach to discourse planning in natural language generation. More specifically, we address the problem of learning the most natural ordering of facts in discourse plans for a specific domain. We discuss our methodology and how it was instantiated using two different machine learning algorithms. A quantitative evaluation performed in the domain of museum exhibit descriptions indicates that our approach performs significantly better than manually constructed ordering rules. Being retrainable, the resulting planners can be ported easily to other similar domains, without requiring language technology expertise.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl