Sabine Geldof

Con-textual navigation support

Abstract The exponentially increasing amount of information being made available world-widely through a basic form of hypertext technology creates problems and opportunities for advancing the state of the art in human-machine interaction. The major problem for users is to find their way in this heterogeneous hyperspace and to quickly access the information they need, the major opportunity is the connectivity and interactivity between a substantial population and a considerable amount of resources and knowledge. In this paper we present, through an example application, a novel way of supporting the user of a WWW application. The approach is novel in that we generate a context-sensitive meta-text to serve as a navigation guide for an existing application (rather than to make the application itself user adaptive) and that we use a very dynamic user model, trying to capture the users minute-to-minute evolving context. We finally discuss how the foundations of this approach fit into a radically new way of sup...

From Context to Sentence Form

When generating utterances, humans may choose among a number of alternative sentence forms expressing the same propositional content. The context determines these decisions to a large extent. This paper presents a strategy to allow for such context-sensitive variation when generating text for a wearable, advice giving device. Several dimensions of context feed a model of the hearers attention space, which, in terms of Information Structure Theory, determines the form of the sentence to be generated.

Talking Wearables Exploit Context

Abstract: This paper addresses the issue of how natural language generation technology can contribute to less intrusive wearable devices. Based on the investigation of how humans adapt the form of their utterances to the context of their hearer, we propose a strategy to relate (physical) context to the automated generation of natural language utterances. First we emphasise that different dimensions of context need to be taken into account and illustrate this with examples of lexical choice. Then we elaborate a strategy for determining sentence structure and prosody annotation based on the context relating to focus of attention. Our approach sets up an experimental basis in the context of an advice-giving wearable device (parrot).

Competing Software Agents Support Human Agents

A community of interacting software agents can support an activity of human agents. We describe an experiment based on an existing information server showing how software agents compete for the attention of the user with the intention to support her in an information-rich task through providing her some useful comment. To be successful in the competition, agents have to capture contextual parameters about the current activity of the user and render them in a context-sensitive annotation to information. The outcome of the competition for attention consists of a weighted topic structure, annotated with text templates. The annotated topic structure is the basis for generating a context-sensitive navigation node by a process of template expansion and aggregation.

Report on the 1993 Bolzano International School in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence: NLP and Multilingualism

We will present the important topics dealt with by the lecturers, relate them to each other, we will expand on the aspects of these topics that relate to linguistics and artificial intelligence and eventually relate them to past or ongoing work at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We are particularly interested in the interaction between artificial intelligence and natural language processing: to what extent are similar problems encountered and how are they tackled in each field?