Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Efficiency of Knowledge Transfer by Hearing
a Conversation While Doing Something
Eiko Yamamoto and Hitoshi Isahara
Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University, Toyohashi University of Technology
Japan
1. Introduction
One of the most common means of acquiring useful knowledge is reading suitable
documents and websites. However, this is time-consuming and cannot be done in parallel
with other tasks. Is there a way to acquire knowledge when we cannot read written texts,
such as while driving a car, walking around or doing housework? It is not easy to remember
the contents of a document simply by listening to its reading aloud from the top, even if we
concentrate while listening. In contrast, it is sometimes easier to remember words heard on
the radio or television even if we are not concentrating on them.
While we are doing something, listening to conversation is better than listening to a precise
reading out of a draft or summary for memorizing the contents and turning them into
knowledge. We are therefore trying to improve the efficiency of knowledge transfer
1
by
“hearing a conversation while doing something.”
In order to support knowledge acquisition by humans, we aim to develop a system which
provides people with useful knowledge while they are doing something or not
concentrating on listening. We did not try to edit notes to be read out, or to summarize
documents; rather, we aimed to develop a way of transferring knowledge. Specifically, in
order to provide knowledge efficiently with computers, we consider how to turn the content
into a dialogue that is easily remembered, and develop a system to produce dialogue by
which one can easily acquire knowledge.
In the next section of this article, we explain our prototype system named “Sophisticated
Eliza” (Isahara et al., 2005) Then, we discuss the idea of “Efficient knowledge transfer by
hearing a conversation while doing something”(Yamamoto & Isahara, 2008).
1 In this paper, "(knowledge) transfer" is a movement of knowledge/information from a knowledge
source, including a human, to a human recipient. That is to say, the term “knowledge transfer”
means not only transferring knowledge between people but also transferring knowledge from
computers to human. "Acquisition" is a process of understanding/memorizing knowledge by the
human recipient. We focus on the process of synthesizing conversation being uttered for knowledge
transfer, which relates to the "externalization" in SECI model (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), in order to
realize efficient knowledge acquisition by the recipient, which relates to the "combination" in the
model.
