About the use of UNL in key words, key images and key concepts transcultural analysis

Preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics : The LingTour and KNOWLISTICS projects MAO Yuhang, DING Xiao-Qing, NI Yang, LIN Shiuan-Sung, Laurence LIKFORMAN, Gérard CHOLLET Presented here by Gérard CHOLLET ENST/CNRS-LTCI

Outline Rationale of the proposal Objectives  The Beijing 2008 Olympics Approaches  Multimedia, multilingual information server  Intelligent Camera  Bilingual Voice Communicator Needs and relevance  A PDA for tourists and travelling businessmen Conclusions and Perspectives

Rationale for the IP-KNOWLISTICS Logistics for knowledge in a specific domain (OG) Language independent knowledge representation and management Multimedia (text, speech, image, video) Multimodal access (text, speech, visual I/O) Distributed multimedia server accessible from mobile terminals (phone, PDA, PC,…) Primarily targetted to tourist applications initially 2008 Beijing Olympics as a field trial

Technical developments Language independent knowledge representation (using conceptual graphs and an Intermediate Representation Language like ‘Universal Networking Language’) Summarisation and reformulation of texts Generation in 12 target languages Speech synthesis and recognition VoiceXML-based interactive dialog agent ‘Intelligent camera’ with Chinese character recognition Cross-language ‘Multimodal communicator’ on a PDA Cross-language lexical access

Chinese character recognition

Intelligent camera from Tsinghua Univ. capture reco translation

Extracting text in scene images Complex color images Uncontrolled illumination Variations : size, fonts, orientation, texture Complex backgrounds, shadows

Text extraction Searching for character regions (text has uniform color)  Multi-channel decomposition  Connected components analysis  Grouping of components  Alignment analysis (number of horizontally or vertically aligned components)  Text identification (language independant features : size, alignment,…) Detection rate : 84 % False alarm rate : 5.6 %

Cross-language Multimodal Communicator Use of a visual display (e.g. on a PDA) to mediate the dialogue between 2 persons speaking different languages. Recognition of short utterances, display of a word graph, selection of keywords, visualisation (and synthesis) of the translation of key words and groups of words. Specialised lexicon for dialog acts in typical touristic situations (in a restaurant, at the hotel, in the street, in public transport, about the Olympic games,…) UMTS access to an information server offering maps, photographs, video sequences,…

Generation in target languages Sharing of acoustic models between languages to simplify extensibility to other languages. Combination of phone models with small amounts of data. Models adaptation to user and environmental situations. French Chinese Shared acoustic models Language specific models

Knowledge representation A formal language for representating the meaning of natural language sentence. UNL (Universal Networking Language) introduced to describe natural language semantics. Language-independent context indexing, possible for cross-language information retrieval. Use of conceptual hierarchy of UNL to address the inherent ambiguity of natural languages. A set of semantic relations (linking concepts together) for a structured information pattern.

UNL representation “The cat drank the milk” agt(drink(icl>do,agt>thing, obj(drink(icl>do,agt>thing, can be encoded by: agt, obj are binary semantic relations

Role of semantic contents representation in indexing Digital Audio Video Textual Cross lingual Multimedia platform User’s request UNL encoding User specific information UNL decoding

Application architecture UMTS server Speech synthesis Access information a word graph, + a list of keywords Translation

Digital Olympic Multi-Language Information Network Service System Project

From VoiceXML to VoiceUNL. Presented here by Gérard CHOLLET ENST/CNRS-LTCI With the contribution of Christian BOITET

Outline Rationale of the proposition Objectives  Promotion of a new standard, demonstrations Approaches  An extra layer of VoiceXML Need and relevance  Multilingual Vocal Servers Integration and structuring effect Conclusions and Perspectives

Rationale for VoiceUNL Need for Language Independent Vocal Servers,  Need for a language independent knowledge representation and management formalism Principle of proposed solution: Start from UNL graphs augmented with voice- oriented semantic marks (special UWs, attributes), Generate in the target language, Voice-oriented marks become prosodic markers, Final conversion to VoiceXML 2008 Beijing Olympics as a field trial

What is VoiceXML ? A recommendation of W3C (WWW Consortium) An extension of XML for vocal information servers, A set of normalised markup tags, Current ags concern language identification, voice prompting, speech synthesis, form filling, barge in, echo cancelling,… No provision to access a semantically encoded data base, Need for a UNL-type front-end Compatibility with MPEG4-SNHC (talking head)

Applications

Prosodic information in UNL Attributes that can influence the grammatical and the prosodic structure of a sentence already exist: Representations should be defined, concerning : @relaxed…?  Focus: grouping words to emphasize in a scope?  special UWs for voice characteristics…?  Expression (for face and gesture animation): special UWs/constructs?

Conclusions and Perspectives Demonstrations to be prepared within the LingTour, Normalangue and KNOWLISTICS projects First target is the Beijing 2008 Olympics Some concept-oriented formalism (such as Sowa's conceptual graphs) may be used to store knowledge before building in UNL "interlingual prelinguistic, communicative content"

Conclusions and Perspectives UNL representation of meaning of natural language sentences directly available for retrieval, indexing and knowledge extraction. UNL with multimedia contents (text, speech, image, video) and multimodal access (text, speech, visual I/O) to enrich the service for communication. Comprehensive and extensive information service on PDAs with access to UMTS and wireless LAN.