1 Distance education : What could technology offer ? Gérard CHOLLET ENST/CNRS-LTCI 46 rue Barrault PARIS cedex 13

Information Technologies for Distance Education Development of multimedia computer terminals with advanced I/O devices (audio and video), High (or not so high) bandwidth networks including VoIP, multicasting, videoconferencing, chat spaces, discussion forums, , … Storage media (CDROM, DVD, …) Compression of audio- and video-documents Semantic encoding of such documents Multilingual access to information content Natural Language and Speech Understanding

The ARISTOTLE project Make accessible to 2000 students, through a University Intranet and through high bandwidth Internet (2Mbps), a first year university course on Biology. Provide anytime, anywhere access to the course material, including lectures, indexing, search engine, chat space, forum, ,… Develop Natural Language and Speech Processing tools to improve interaction between students, teachers and the knowledge web.

Components of The Online-Classroom of Aristotle Internet Browser RealPlayer G2 plug-in Bitcasting MPEG plug-in Media Server Administrator Streaming Media Server CONTENT DIRECTORIES MPEG, JPEG files HTML files SMIL, RealText Files Web Server Administrator Web Server

Aristotle on-line lecture

Knowledge Web Representation Celullar Organization Evolution BIOLOGY Genetics Genetic Engineering DNA Darwinian Evolution Evolution of primates Legend: LinkType1: Subtopic/Supertopic LinkType2: Related Knowledge Node

Challenges of future education using IT Develop new pedagogical paradigms Personalisation and group synergy Access to information and guidance Communication between students, between students and teachers, and between students and educational software Worldwide accessability for all languages of the world Improve networking technology

A perspective Language independent knowledge web Information on this web is represented semantically (for ex. in UNL: a pivot language) The student can access this information in (his, her) own language Information is generated from the pivot language to the target (natural) language Tools are being developed to help teachers create this knowledge web and validate the UNL representation and translation in various languages.

What is the Universal Networking Language (UNL)? An initiative from the United Nations, A common (standard, artificial) language for computers to express (encode) information written in natural language, Consists of Universal Words, Relations, Semantic attributes, Knowledge Base, Represent sentences as a semantic graph A node represents a concept An arc represents a relation

semantic representation of sentences: → “ How is translation performed by computers? ”... extraction of relevant keywords to build the query: → agt(translate(icl>do),computer(icl>machine)) UNL: Universal Networking Language translate(icl>do) computers(icl>machine) agt

Languages covered so far : The 6 UN official languages : Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian and other languages : German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongol, Latvia, Portuguese, Thai

UNL architecture Internet Web Page Contents UNL-server Language Server A UNL Chinese Language Server B UNL French Internet enconverter deconverter Chinese French UNL Viewer UNL Proxy

Access to Multilingual documents using UNL

Conclusions and Perspectives a semantic representation of content is a benefit for: –the creation of non-ambiguous textual material, –an efficient search through large databases, –the access to such material in many languages of the world. multimedia compression will always be beneficial for: –a fast access to information, –the indexing of audio-visual documents.

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