Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 11:34:58 -1000 (HST)
From: "Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D." <bralich@hawaii.edu>
Subject: Summary of Responses to "UNIQUE NLP" (and CONCLUSION)
SUMMARY
About two weeks ago I requested information concerning NLP
software that offered the ability to do a q&a exchange
between animations and a user similar to the "ChatterBox"
software (free) we have at http://www.haptek.com. Here is
a summary of the responses I got and a short commentary on
each. In addition, I have added a few that I have found via
Microsoft concerning a parrot named "Perdy" and similar
characters. Take a look for yourself and you can see the
degree to which these different companies and research
institutions are making it possible to chat with computers
and animations for fun, internet searches, and information
exchange.
1.
You should have a look at the work by Boris Katz at the MIT AI lab.
He's been working on a system called START for some time that does
such things and more. See the web page at
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infolab/ for more info.
2.
The Information Science Institute at USC (www.isi.edu) did a lot of work in
that area about 10 years ago, using, I believe, their PENMAN syntax
analyzer. I think the project was lead by Ed Hovy, who was still a director
there last year but seems to have left since. There was also a Dr.
Christiensen (spelling?) but he has returned to Australia, probably at
McQuarrie University with MAK Halliday. Not much help, but you can try
emailing ISI staff: some may remember.
3.
Kevin Lenzo has a bot named url which stores information and answers
questions online, from multiple users, phrased similarly.
url hangs out in MUSHes, but I don't remember which ones.
It seems that you developed a kind of chatterbot or digital secretary.
There are many chatterbots developed.
You can see the other chatterbots 'http://www.toptown.com/hp/sjlaven/'
4.
The Microsoft and several other industry sites for this research are
at:
http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/ui/persona/home.htm
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/projects/interface9495-srct.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/cmu.edu/misc/mosaic/common/omega/web/frontdoor.
html
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gva/gvatop.html
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/projects/cait/index.html
CONCLUSION
While all these sites have interesting applications for speech and
animations they do not have the ability to put in factual information
and then query for that information. Usually they have a key word
search ability which allows them to return particular paragraphs
from a body of data based on the key words of a query. However,
to ask and answer questions like the following only seems to
be possible with ChatterBox at http://www.haptek.com. There
were no announcements of the development of such technology
at these other companies.
Who was the first president of the United States?
Who invented the telescope?
When did Columbus come to America?
Hey Mickey, Where did you find that treasure map?
What is your email address?
What is your fax number?
and so on.
Phil Bralich
Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.
President and CEO
Ergo Linguistic Technologies
2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808)539-3920
Fax: (808)539-3924
bralich@hawaii.edu
http://www.ergo-ling.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Humanist Discussion Group
Information at <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
=========================================================================