1. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 TRans European Employment TREE Jeremy Ellman MARI Group Ltd & Joakim Nivre Gothenburg University

2. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Overview of the Presentation  Goals of the Project  Management Issues  Technical Presentation  Dissemination and Exploitation  Future Plans

3. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Goals of the Project  Primary Objective: – "To improve equality of opportunity in European Employment using Language Engineering Techniques”  Realisation: To create an Internet based Multi- Lingual Employment Advertising service  Accepts Job Adverts in Multiple Languages  Multi-lingual Search Engine  Generation in Multiple Languages

4. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Target Market  Public Bodies with “Equal Opportunities” Initiatives – Newcastle City Council (NCC), Swedish Employment Service (AMS)  Multinational Organisations with Localised Skills Deficits – Siemens, Proctor & Gamble  Employment Organisations wishing to offer Additional Services via WWW – Reed  Charitable “Social Inclusion” Initiatives – Foyers, YouthNet, Immigrants’ Institute

5. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Responsibilities of the Partners  Project Management (MARI)  Technical Activities – NL Generation (Gothenburg ) – Terminology (UMIST), – Database Design (Quinary), – WWW Support (MARI with ACE) – User Interface Design (MARI)  Users and Data Supply – Trials and Trial design (VDAB, NCC, YouthNet) – Data Supply ( VDAB, NCC)

6. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 User Involvement  User Trials of Prototype 1 at VDAB and NCC  YouthNet and NCC managing trials for P2 – NCC in Amsterdam using TeleCities – YouthNet through Foyer contacts in Brede  Future Participation of Swedish Employment Service (AMS) and Immigrants’ Institute.

7. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Management Procedures  CEC Reporting Procedures (Bi-Monthly reports etc)  Quarterly Consortium Meetings  Quarterly Meetings with Project Officer or by arrangement  Consortium Agreement + Associate Partner Contracts  Project Wide Quality Plan  Project e-mail discussion list

8. TREE: Progress Review March 1998

9. Results of Annual Review One  Re-Do Market Survey – Deliverable D21a (Draft)  P02 to be Integrated at VDAB – Contractual and Resource problems at VDAB  Replace ManPower – YouthNet new Associate partner to VDAB

10. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Progress on the WorkPlan

11. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Technical Issues  Technology Baseline  Prototypes and Components  Databases – Job Schema database – Terminology  Generation Jeremy Ellman: This Outlines the Technical Issues Section that follows. Handover point?? Jeremy Ellman: This Outlines the Technical Issues Section that follows. Handover point??

12. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Technology Baseline  TREE is a WWW Application  HTML and Java Interfaces  Implemented using Oracle 7.3 RDBMS and Oracle Web Server 2.1  Applications written in C/C++, PL/SQL, PROLOG, Java

13. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Prototype P01  Technology Validator – 30 Job Titles in Catering Employment Domain – 50 Jobs Stored – Pure HTML Interface  Generation in Three Languages  Job Advert Entry in supported Languages  Multi-lingual Search  Small Scale dB (mSQL)

14. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Prototype P02  7000+ Terms  12,000+ Job Adverts imported from VDAB  Visible in Flemish, French, English  User Interfaces for Experts and Novices – Text & Java Search Interfaces – Key Fields: Job Title, Location  Terminology Hierarchy has 5 levels 10 ‘root’ nodes following VDAB Job Classification Hierarchy permits general search

15. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 The TREE Job Schema  The job schema is a store of job ads – Slot, filler structure  Slots – Elements of Job Ads  Fillers – Language independent terminological references – Source language strings

16. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Database Design  Identification of job advert structure – Implemented as relational dB tables (e.g. Application details)  Identification of elements of job – Implemented as columns (e.g. job title, salary)  Identification of relationships – Implemented as constraints on column values (e.g. foreign keys) – All job adverts must be advertised by an advertiser

17. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Job Schema Structure

18. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Data Transfer  Advert Sources – VDAB (VACWIS)  Slot & Code mapping – Source dB slots to TREE job schema slots – Source dB codes to TREE terminological codes  Source free text Analysis  Future Advert Sources – NCC, AMS

19. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Terminology Resource - Purpose  Repository of domain specific terms – I.e. employment domain  Semantic ‘equivalence’ – Semantically equivalent terms share language neutral code  Establishes semantic structure – Hierarchical structure of codes (e.g. VDAB job codes)  Defines job schema filler sets

20. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Terminology Resource Structure

21. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Terminology Gathering  Data Entry & Viewing Tools – Developed by QUIN  Use of Existing Linguistic Resources – VDAB job codes – Translation to English & French

22. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Search Interfaces  Expert Users – Text box – Typical WWW dB search interface  Naïve Users – Explicit presentation of search parameters – Set of parameter values presented Searchable lists to speed selection – Control of results generation

23. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Naïve Users Search Interface

24. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Multilingual Generation  Multiple Languages: – English – French – Flemish – Swedish (P03) – Finnish (P03)  Variable output formats: – One-liners – Full ads of varying length, depending on Available Information

25. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 An Integrated Approach  Hypertext Grammar: Simple but flexible integration of – Text Planning and Sentence Realization, – Canned Text, Templates, Grammar Rules, – NLG and Text Encoding.  Modular Approach to Multilinguality: – Language-neutral: Hyptertext Grammar, logical dB interface. – Language-specific: Text Grammar, Phrase Structure Grammar.  Lexical Resources from Term dB

26. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Analysis  Free-text patterns – Identify potential job schema slot fillers – Validated by terminology  MEG matcher – Uses sliding matcher – Large corpus of example phrases

27. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Exploitation and Dissemination  P02 demo visible at http://atlas.mari.co.uk:8989/  Academic Papers – ANLP Conference ‘97 – UNICOM Conference ‘97 – ERCIM UI Workshop ‘97  Interest from various Organisations – Swedish Employment Agency (AMS) – Siemens – Reed Employment (UK) – Immigrants’ Institute (SE)

28. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Into 1998  Technical – Expansion of Terminology Resource – Generation of Swedish and Finnish – Refinement of Search and Generation capabilities – dB import task NCC & AMS jobs dB – Continual Site Development  Dissemination & Exploitation – Academic papers – P03

29. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 Prototype 3  Primary Site at Newcastle Foyer – IT room funded by BT – Local agreements on vacancy sources Working Relationship with DfEE 30 Local Employment Agencies  “Virtual Foyer” with content supplied by NCC, YouthNet  GU to organise related trials with AMS, Immigrants’ Institute

30. TREE: Progress Review March 1998 The Virtual Foyer