Project financed by: |
Multimodal Interaction for Information Services
|
|
Introduction Research goals Relevance Scientific production Members Links |
IntroductionGiven the ever increasing information load on the Internet and elsewhere, it is of utmost importance to promote efficient means and techniques for pinpointing specific and relevant information. Recent research within the fields of Information Extraction and Open Domain Question Answering is showing that the key to successful information processing lies not only in efficient retrieval methods, but also in methods of understanding the precise meaning of information requests. Natural language (spoken or written) provides an intuitive way of stating such requests. For example, if a user wants to know about the relative size of populations in two countries, there is a number of ways that this request can be expressed in natural language, such as Which country is the largest: Bahamas or the Dominican Republic?, Is Bahamas larger than the Dominican Republic? etc. The important observation is, however, that natural language questions do contain specific leads to what the search engine should look for that cannot be captured in the state-of-the-art search engines. It has also been observed that information requests are not always successfully completed in single questions. Instead the user and system has to take part in a task-oriented dialogue where information has to be added by the user or the system to arrive at a satisfactory formulation of the information problem. To continue the example above, a straightforward follow up question could be Do you mean area or population?In order to allow for such interaction a number of research issues must be addressed. In the proposed project we will utilise and combine knowledge and methods from two areas of language technology:
|
Page responsible: Webmaster
Last updated: 2012-05-07