Marta Gatius

An information state-based dialogue manager for making voice web smarter

In this paper we propose the integration of intelligent components technologies (natural language and discourse management) in voice web interfaces to make them smarter. We describe how we have integrated reusable components of dialogue management and language processing in a multilingual voice system to improve its friendliness and portability. The dialogue management component deals with complex dialogue phenomena, such as user-initiative dialogues, and follows the information state-based theory. The resulting dialogue system supports friendly communication (through the telephone and the web) in several languages: English, Spanish, Catalan and Italian. The dialogue system has been adapted to guide the users to access online public administration services.

Integrating semantic web and language technologies to improve the online public administrations services

In this paper, we describe how domain ontologies are used in a dialogue system guiding the user to access web public administration contents. The current implementation of the system supports speech (through the telephone) and text mode in different languages (English, Spanish, Catalan and Italian).

A flexible dialogue system for enhancing web usability

In this paper, we study how the performance and usability of web dialogue systems could be enhanced by using an appropriate representation of the different types of knowledge involved in communication: general dialogue mechanisms, specific domain-restricted linguistic and conceptual knowledge and information on how well the communication process is doing. We describe the experiments carried out to analyze how to improve this knowledge representation in the web dialogue system we developed.

Multilingual and multimedia information retrieval from Web documents

Web documents present new challenges to conventional information retrieval (IR) technologies. This paper describes how these challenges are faced in FameIR, a multilingual multimedia IR shell. In this shell cross-language IR (CLIR) and query expansion are performed using EuroWordNet (EWN), the best developed and most widely used lexical resource for several languages. Techniques to extract information from Web documents, wrapper generation (WG) techniques, are used to access a finer information granularity than the whole Web page. By combining IR and WG techniques with the use of EWN, FameIR provides a powerful facility to perform CLIR from multimedia Web documents.

Using application-specific ontologies to improve performance in a bottom-up parser

This paper describes how the application specific knowledge represented in ontologies is used to improve the processing of user interventions in a multilingual dialogue system for multiple applications. The user interventions are processed by a left-corner parser performing syntactic and semantic analysis in parallel. The parser uses application-restricted grammars and lexicons obtained from ontologies representing the application specific knowledge. It also uses the knowledge of the dialogue context to select the grammar rules related to the dialogue focus.

Natural Language Guided Dialogues for Accessing the Web

This paper proposes the use of ontologies representing domain and linguistic knowledge for guiding natural language (NL) communication on the Web contents. This proposal deals with the problem of obtaining and processing the Web data required to answer users queries. Concepts and communication acts are represented in a conceptual ontology (CO). Domain-restricted linguistic resources are obtained automatically by adapting the general linguistic knowledge to cover the communication acts for a particular domain. The use of domain-restricted grammars and lexicons has proved to be efficient, especially when the user is guided in introducing the sentences. To answer users queries the system fires the appropriate wrappers to extract the data from the Web. The CO provides a unifying framework to represent and process the knowledge obtained from the Web. Following this proposal, a dialogue-system for accessing a set of Web sites on the travelling domain in Spanish has been implemented.

Adaptive Generation of Multilingual Questions and Answers from Web Content

This article describes the adaptive generation of questions and answers from web content to assist the user when searching for information. The approach proposed integrates user models, domain-restricted knowledge representation, natural language and wrappers techniques. This proposal is based on the representation of the main concepts involved in a specific scenario as a set of attributes, and the user models as the subset of those conceptual attributes relevant for each user. The approach described has been applied to generate multilingual personalized questions and answers from web sites in two different domains: university courses and dissemination on nutrition.