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The Companions a possible future Integrating concept Yorick Wilks ILASH University of Sheffield, UK. Roadmap Workshop LREC 2002 Las Canarias. The future of Human Language Processing R&D. The Research Issues are not solved, but.. It is generally agreed what the issues are:
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The Companionsa possible future Integrating conceptYorick WilksILASHUniversity of Sheffield, UK Roadmap Workshop LREC 2002 Las Canarias
The future of Human Language Processing R&D • The Research Issues are not solved, but.. • It is generally agreed what the issues are: • Dialogue and interface issues • Information access issues (Semantic Web..) • Information presentation issues • But HLT must not be swallowed up in VR, Intelligent systems etc. implementations if the research frontier in HLT is to advance.
An idea for integrating the research agenda in a new application... • That meets social and economic needs (rather than defence) • That is not simply a product but everyone will want one if it succeeds • That cannot be done now but can in six years by a series of staged prototypes • That modularises easily for large project management, and whose modules cover the research issues.
A series of intelligent and sociable COMPANIONS • The SeniorCompanion • The EU will have more and more old people who find technological life hard to handle • The SC will sit beside you on the sofa but be easy to carry about
The Senior Companion….. • It will explain the plots of TV programs and help choose them for you • It will know you and what you like and don’t • It wills send your messages, make calls and summon emergency help.
The Senior Companion…. • It will explain official communications • It will answer questions from web contact • Remind you what was said by visitors • Remind you of where you should be.. • Store your early memories should you wish to confide them • It will know and monitor your state of health • BUT it will be YOUR COMPANION, not the State’s!
Other COMPANIONS • The JuniorCompanion • Teaches and advises, maybe a backpack • Warns of dangerous situations • Helps with homework and web search • Helps with languages • Knows where the child is………. • Explains ambient signals and information • Messaging to parents/school when needed
All companions advance the research, social and economic agendas • The MeetingCompanion • Separates speaker audio streams • Transcribes and summaries the meeting • Suggests ways in which to advance agenda points • Captures and preserves the practice of solutions developed by a group (KM)
We can prototype all these COMPANIONs with incremental advances on the HLT technologies we now have. • Speech and language dialogue models, including messages and multimodals • Deriving models of agents’ beliefs/ontologies/lexicons • Content-based extraction from large resources, including structure building • Document production, summarization, classification, authoring and translation.
Given all that, would the COMPANIONS still be a paradigm... • That will advance our research agenda? • and have a distinctively HLT element? • that will create a market (cf. Tamagotchi)? • that will find new markets for e.f. Telecoms? • that will aid citizen sectors? • that will be a device acceptable to citizens?
More COMPANION questions…. • that will be modularizable within a large project? • that could show striking advance withing a full project lifetime (3-6yrs)? • that will build on existing EU expertise? • that will be evaluable? • that will not violate privacy considerations? • that is essentially multilingual? • that needs resources?