Kenneth Wauchope

Natural Language in Four Spatial Interfaces

We describe our experiences building spoken language interfaces to four demonstration applications all involving 2- or 3-D spatial displays or gestural interactions: an air combat command and control simulation, an immersive VR tactical scenario viewer, a map-based air strike simulation tool with cartographic database, and a speech/gesture controller for mobile robots.

Structural domain modeling for understanding equipment failure messages

Demonstrates that domain-specific knowledge is required to recover implicit references to causality from narrative texts that describe equipment failures. Understanding texts that discuss complex pieces of equipment requires the possession not only of general knowledge about the types of objects and predicates in the domain, but also detailed knowledge about the particular equipment in question. This more expert level of knowledge is needed to dereference the names and descriptions of equipment referred to in the text and to infer their causal relationships and operational states when these are only implicitly expressed by the message writer. Knowing the structural configuration of the equipment is useful in both tasks, and a structural domain model can be extracted readily from equipment manuals and their accompanying parts lists, thus easing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem and making practical applications more feasible.<<ETX>>

A Spoken Language Interface to a Virtual Reality System (Video)

Stephanie S. Everett, Kenneth Wauchope Navy Ctr . for Appl ied Resea rch in AI Naval Resea rch L a b o r a t o r y W a s h i n g t o n , DC 20375, USA e v e r e t t I w a u c h o p e

Two Multimodal Interfaces to Military Simulations

Abstract : Eucalyptus and InterLACE are two projects integrating spoken natural language interaction with the already-developed graphical user interfaces of currently existing military simulation systems. We take this approach (rather than developing new, fully integrated systems from scratch) to facilitate the development of Navy demonstrations of NL technology applied to their own tools, as well as to explore the relative strengths and weaknesses of graphical vs. NL interfaces and how the two can be used in combination to yield more powerful interaction techniques. The natural language processing capability of the two systems is described in an accompanying Proceedings technical note (Wauchope et al. 1997); here we go into a bit more detail on the issues of multimodal integration with graphical interfaces.