1996 SALS-SIG Seminars

SALS-SIG Research Seminar

How to be interesting: meta-information in the Intelligent Labelling Explorer

Jon Oberlander [Joint research with Alistair Knott, Chris Mellish and Mick O'Donnell]
Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh

When: Friday, 2nd August 1996

Time: 3:15pm

Where: Room E6A357, Macquarie University

Abstract:

The Intelligent Labelling Explorer (ILEX) is a natural language generation system which plays the role of a museum curator who describes on demand whichever museum artefact is selected by a visitor. The current implementation dynamically generates Web pages (and thus is not unlike PEBA-II), and in particular, tailors the content to the user model and discourse context. ILEX works under some intriguing constraints. First, although its descriptions must of course be accurate, they must also be *interesting*. Unless the information presented captures the visitor's attention, they will simply give up and walk away from the system. Secondly, although its descriptions must be both accurate and interesting, they must also help achieve the educational goals of the system: the descriptions must be get across what's *important* about the domain.

In the talk, I'll focus on the current method we are using to help ILEX be more interesting. This involves the addition of "meta-information" to the knowledge base, annotating each potentially expressible piece of information with indices reflecting its current assimilation, rate-of-assimilation, importance, and interest. I'll indicate how these go together to keep the visitor reading.

Enquiries: Maria Milosavljevic 9850 6345 mariam@mpce.mq.edu.au