Designing Service-Oriented Chatbot Systems Using a Construction Grammar-Driven Natural Language Generation System

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to inform users in a conversational manner about a particular service or product on a website. Our research shows that current systems are time consuming to build and not very accurate or satisfying to users. We find that natural language understanding and natural language generation methods are central to creating an e�fficient and useful system. In this thesis we investigate current and past methods in this research area and place particular emphasis on Construction Grammar and its computational implementation. Our research shows that users have strong emotive reactions to how these systems behave, so we also investigate the human computer interaction component. We present three systems (KIA, John and KIA2), and carry out extensive user tests on all of them, as well as comparative tests. KIA is built using existing methods, John is built with the user in mind and KIA2 is built using the construction grammar method. We found that the construction grammar approach performs well in service oriented chatbots systems, and that users preferred it over other systems

Formalizing graphical notations

The thesis describes research into graphical notations for software engineering, with a principal interest in ways of formalizing them. The research seeks to provide a theoretical basis that will help in designing both notations and the software tools that process them. The work starts from a survey of literature on notation, followed by a review of techniques for formal description and for computational handling of notations. The survey concentrates on collecting views of the benefits and the problems attending notation use in software development; the review covers picture description languages, grammars and tools such as generic editors and visual programming environments. The main problem of notation is found to be a lack of any coherent, rigorous description methods. The current approaches to this problem are analysed as lacking in consensus on syntax specification and also lacking a clear focus on a defined concept of notated expression. To address these deficiencies, the thesis embarks upon an exploration of serniotic, linguistic and logical theory; this culminates in a proposed formalization of serniosis in notations, using categorial model theory as a mathematical foundation. An argument about the structure of sign systems leads to an analysis of notation into a layered system of tractable theories, spanning the gap between expressive pictorial medium and subject domain. This notion of 'tectonic' theory aims to treat both diagrams and formulae together. The research gives details of how syntactic structure can be sketched in a mathematical sense, with examples applying to software development diagrams, offering a new solution to the problem of notation specification. Based on these methods, the thesis discusses directions for resolving the harder problems of supporting notation design, processing and computer-aided generic editing. A number of future research areas are thereby opened up. For practical trial of the ideas, the work proceeds to the development and partial implementation of a system to aid the design of notations and editors. Finally the thesis is evaluated as a contribution to theory in an area which has not attracted a standard approach

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

Eighty Challenges Facing Speech Input/Output Technologies

ABSTRACT During the past three decades, we have witnessed remarkable progress in the development of speech input/output technologies. Despite these successes, we are far from reaching human capabilities of recognizing nearly perfectly the speech spoken by many speakers, under varying acoustic environments, with essentially unrestricted vocabulary. Synthetic speech still sounds stilted and robot-like, lacking in real personality and emotion. There are many challenges that will remain unmet unless we can advance our fundamental understanding of human communication -how speech is produced and perceived, utilizing our innate linguistic competence. This paper outlines some of these challenges, ranging from signal presentation and lexical access to language understanding and multimodal integration, and speculates on how these challenges could be met

Knowledge representation and text mining in biomedical, healthcare, and political domains

Knowledge representation and text mining can be employed to discover new knowledge and develop services by using the massive amounts of text gathered by modern information systems. The applied methods should take into account the domain-specific nature of knowledge. This thesis explores knowledge representation and text mining in three application domains. Biomolecular events can be described very precisely and concisely with appropriate representation schemes. Protein–protein interactions are commonly modelled in biological databases as binary relationships, whereas the complex relationships used in text mining are rich in information. The experimental results of this thesis show that complex relationships can be reduced to binary relationships and that it is possible to reconstruct complex relationships from mixtures of linguistically similar relationships. This encourages the extraction of complex relationships from the scientific literature even if binary relationships are required by the application at hand. The experimental results on cross-validation schemes for pair-input data help to understand how existing knowledge regarding dependent instances (such those concerning protein–protein pairs) can be leveraged to improve the generalisation performance estimates of learned models. Healthcare documents and news articles contain knowledge that is more difficult to model than biomolecular events and tend to have larger vocabularies than biomedical scientific articles. This thesis describes an ontology that models patient education documents and their content in order to improve the availability and quality of such documents. The experimental results of this thesis also show that the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation measures are a viable option for the automatic evaluation of textual patient record summarisation methods and that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve can be used in a large-scale sentiment analysis. The sentiment analysis of Reuters news corpora suggests that the Western mainstream media portrays China negatively in politics-related articles but not in general, which provides new evidence to consider in the debate over the image of China in the Western media

XML: aplicações e tecnologias associadas: 6th National Conference

This volume contains the papers presented at the Sixth Portuguese XML Conference, called XATA (XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas), held in Évora, Portugal, 14-15 February, 2008. The conference followed on from a successful series held throughout Portugal in the last years: XATA2003 was held in Braga, XATA2004 was held in Porto, XATA2005 was held in Braga, XATA2006 was held in Portalegre and XATA2007 was held in Lisboa. Dued to research evaluation criteria that are being used to evaluate researchers and research centers national conferences are becoming deserted. Many did not manage to gather enough submissions to proceed in this scenario. XATA made it through. However with a large decrease in the number of submissions. In this edition a special meeting will join the steering committee with some interested attendees to discuss XATA's future: internationalization, conference model, ... We think XATA is important in the national context. It has succeeded in gathering and identifying a comunity that shares the same research interests and has promoted some colaborations. We want to keep "the wheel spinning"... This edition has its program distributed by first day's afternoon and next day's morning. This way we are facilitating travel arrangements and we will have one night to meet