Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In section 4, we evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge transfer via listening to
conversation, comparing it with listening to monologues. We firstly choose several topics
and select suitable documents on the topic. Then we extract informative sentences from the
document and form conversation by splitting a sentence into conversational fragments. In
order to verify our hypothesis, we conduct evaluation on the usefulness of listening
conversation formed by the fragments with human subjects. We will also get the suggestion
from the experiments how to select suitable domain for our system.
In section 5, we introduce our prototype system and present some examples of the
conversations extracted by the system. As for the information transfer system, although our
final target is to handle topics which are practically useful such as knowledge from
newspapers, encyclopedia and Wikipedia, as a first step we tried to compile rules for small
procedural domains such as cooking recipes.
2. Sophisticated Eliza
Recently, thanks to the improvement of natural language processing (NLP) technology,
development of high-performance computers and the availability of huge amounts of stored
linguistic data, there are now useful NLP-based systems. There are also practical speech
synthesis tools for reading out documents and tools for summarizing documents. These
tools do not necessarily use state-of-the-art technologies to achieve deep and accurate
language understanding, but are based on huge amounts of linguistic resources that used
not to be available. Although current computer systems can collect huge amounts of
knowledge from real examples, it is not obvious how to transfer knowledge more naturally
between such powerful computer systems and humans. We need to develop a novel way to
transfer knowledge from computers to humans.
We believe that, based on large amounts of text data, it is possible to devise a system which
can generate dialogue by a simple mechanism to give people the impression that two
intelligent persons are talking. We verified this approach by implementing a system named
Sophisticated Eliza which can simulate conversation between two persons on a computer.
Sophisticated Eliza is not a Human-Computer Interaction system; instead, it simulates
conversation by two people and users acquire information by listening to the conversation
generated by the system. Concretely, using an encyclopedia in Japanese (Kodansha
International, 1998) as a knowledge base, we develop rules to extract information from the
knowledge base and create fragments of conversation. We extract rules with syntactic
patterns to make a conversation, for example, “What is A?” “It's B.” from “A is B.” The
system extracts candidate fragments of conversation using these simple scripts and two
voices then read the conversation aloud. This system cannot generate long conversations as
humans do on one topic, but it can simulate short conversations from stored linguistic
resources and continue conversations while changing topics.
Figure 1 shows a screenshot of Sophisticated Eliza and Figure 2 shows its system flow.
Figure 3 is examples of conversation generated by the system.
The encyclopedia utilized here contains all about Japan, e.g., history, culture, economy and
politics. All sentences in the encyclopedia are analyzed syntactically using a Japanese parser
