ICEE Internship International Center for Engineering Education Project: Natural Language Interaction with a Construction Estimating Virtual Reality Environment By: Blake Howe Project Supervisor: Dr. Tulio Sulbaran Presentation Date: July 14, 2003

Objective The objective of this project is to develop a middleware application to enhance the educational experience of construction engineering students

Objective (cont.)   An avatar will be created that will be capable of understanding spoken queries given in a natural form.   These questions will focus on construction materials and methods

IBM Via Voice  Abstraction from the problem  Available Java API  Via Voice will handle the speech aspects

Where is the need?   Allow students to receive help at a time convenient for them   Interface for a VR Environment users that are not technically proficient to communicate. ► :

Java  Language has many available resources (Collections)  Can run on any machine with little modification  Easily modified for the web (Servlets)

Expected Results   My contribution to Virtual Reality   A better understanding of solving complex problems

Expected Results (cont.)  Java package for Natural Language Processing  Java Package for decision tree logic

How is this going to be accomplished?

Natural Language Processing  Templates will handle the most common queries  ATN parser will identify the parts of speech to generate a query to the Database

Decision Tree logic  Trees will be stored in tables  Once the tree is reached users will answer yes or no questions to arrive at the answer

Decision Tree logic (cont.)  The answer will be verified for correctness.  Questions not answered to the users satisfaction will be logged for review.