Who’s Next? From Sentence Completion to Conceptually Guided Message Composition

Michael Zock, Paul Sabatier, Line Jakubiec-Jamet

2007

Abstract

Natural language generation is typically based on messages and goals. We present here our views on how to help people to provide this kind of input, i.e. how to communicate thoughts to the computer, so that it could produce the corresponding surface-forms (sentences). The resource we are building is composed of a linguistically motivated ontology, a dictionary and a graph generator, whose respective functions are (a) guiding the user to make his choices concerning the concepts/words to build the message from, (b) to provide knowledge of how to link the chosen elements to yield a message (compositional rules), and (c) the visual display of the output, i.e. message graph representing the user’s input. Our starting point is Illico, a system developed for French. Yet, being designed for sentence completion rather than message construction, it tends to drown the user by providing too many options, a shortcoming that we try to overcome via the mentioned ontology combined with a tool checking conceptual well formedness. In order to make our goal feasable (allow users to express freely ideas of any sort), we will start by limiting ourselves to two small domains: soccer and textbooks designed for learning French.

References

  1. Guenthner, F., Thielmann, K., Pasero, R., Sabatier, P.: Communications aids for als patients. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computers for Handicapped Persons. (1992) 303-307
  2. Godbert, E., Mouret, P., Pasero, R., M, M.R.: A software for language rehabilitation and education of autistic-like children. In ACL, ed.: Proceedings of the Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Communication Aids. (1997) 59-64
  3. Pasero, R., Sabatier, P.: Linguistic games for language learning: A special use of the illico library. Computer Assisted Language Learning 11 (1998) 561-585 Published by Swets & Zeitlinger.
  4. Boïde, O., Pasero, R., Sabatier, P.: Un système de composition simultanée de phrases en arabe et en franc¸ais. In: Proceedings of the Arabic Translation and Localisation Symposium, ATLAS. (1999) 103-109
  5. Reiter, E., Dale, R.: Building Natural Language Generation Systems. Cambridge University Press (2000)
  6. Bateman, J., Zock, M.: Natural language generation. In Mitkov, R., ed.: Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Oxford University Press (2003) 284-304
  7. Tesnière, L.: Óléments de syntaxe structurale. Klincksieck, Paris (1959)
  8. Schank, R.: Conceptual dependency theory. In Schank, R.C., ed.: Conceptual Information Processing. North-Holland and Elsevier, Amsterdam and New York (1975) 22-82
  9. McCoy, K., Cheng, J.: Focus of attention: Constraining what can be said next. In Paris, C., Swartout, W., Mann, W., eds.: Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. Kluwer Academic Publisher, Boston (1991) 103-124
  10. Zock, M.: Swim or sink: the problem of communicating thought. In Swartz, M., Yazdani, M., eds.: Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Foreign Language Learning. Springer, New York (1991) 235-247
  11. Ferret, O., Zock, M.: Enhancing electronic dictionaries with an index based on associations. In: ACL 7806: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and the 44th annual meeting of the ACL, Morristown, NJ, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics (2006) 281-288
  12. Sabatier, P.: Un lexique-grammaire du football. Lingvisticae Investigationes XXI (1997) 163-197
  13. Baker, C.F., Fillmore, C.J., Lowe, J.B.: The berkeley framenet project. In: COLING/ACL98, Montreal (1998) 86-90
  14. Ligozat, G., Zock, M.: How to visualize time, tense and aspect. In: Proceedings of COLING 7892, Nantes (1992) 475-482
  15. Briffault, X., Zock, M.: What do we mean when we say to the left or to the right? how to learn about space by building and exploring a microworld? In: 6th International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Methodology, Systems, Applications, Sofia (1994) 363- 371
  16. Coq Development Team (Logical Project): The Coq Proof Assistant. Reference manual. INRIA (2004-2006)
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Zock M., Sabatier P. and Jakubiec-Jamet L. (2007). Who’s Next? From Sentence Completion to Conceptually Guided Message Composition . In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science - Volume 1: NLPCS, (ICEIS 2007) ISBN 978-972-8865-97-9, pages 38-46. DOI: 10.5220/0002431700380046


in Bibtex Style

@conference{nlpcs07,
author={Michael Zock and Paul Sabatier and Line Jakubiec-Jamet},
title={Who’s Next? From Sentence Completion to Conceptually Guided Message Composition},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science - Volume 1: NLPCS, (ICEIS 2007)},
year={2007},
pages={38-46},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002431700380046},
isbn={978-972-8865-97-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science - Volume 1: NLPCS, (ICEIS 2007)
TI - Who’s Next? From Sentence Completion to Conceptually Guided Message Composition
SN - 978-972-8865-97-9
AU - Zock M.
AU - Sabatier P.
AU - Jakubiec-Jamet L.
PY - 2007
SP - 38
EP - 46
DO - 10.5220/0002431700380046