Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4. Efficient knowledge transfer by hearing a conversation while doing
something
We started to develop a mechanism to achieve natural knowledge acquisition for humans
by turning information that is written in documents into conversational text. Efficient
methods of acquiring knowledge include not only “reading documents” and “listening to
passages read aloud,” but also “hearing a conversation while doing something,” provided
that information is appropriately embedded into the conversation. We believe that we can
verify that this “conversation hearing” can assist knowledge acquisition by developing a
system for synthesizing conversations by collecting fragments of conversation and
conducting experiments by using the system.
As a means to transfer information, contents conveyed by an interpretive reading with
pronounced intonation are better retained in memory than if read monotonously from a
document or summary. Furthermore, by turning contents into conversation style, even
someone who is not concentrating on listening may become interested in the topic and
acquire the contents naturally. This suggests that several factors in conversations, such as
throwing in words of agreement, pauses and questions, which may appear to decrease the
density of information, are actually effective means of transferring information matching
humans' ability to acquire knowledge with limited concentration. Based on this idea, we
propose a novel mechanism of an information transfer system by considering the way of
transferring knowledge from computers to humans.
Various dialogue systems have already been developed as communication tools between
humans and computers (Waizenbaum, 1966; Matsusaka et al., 1999). However, in our novel
approach, the dialogue system regards the user as an outsider, presents conversation by two
speakers in the computer which is of interest to the outside user, and thus provides the user
with useful knowledge.
There are dialogue systems (Nadamoto & Tanaka, 2004; ALICE; UZURA) which can join in
a conversation between a human and a computer, but they simply create fragments of
conversation and so do not sound like an intelligent human speaker. One reason is that they
do not aim to provide knowledge or transfer information to humans, and few theoretical
evaluations have been done in this field. In this research, we consider a way to transfer
knowledge and develop a conversation system which generates dialogue by which humans
can acquire knowledge from dialogue conducted by two speakers in the computer. We
analyze the way to transfer knowledge to humans with this system. This kind of research is
beneficial not only from an engineering viewpoint but also cognitive science and cognitive
linguistics. Furthermore, a speech synthesis system in which two participants conduct
spoken conversation automatically is rare. In this research, we develop an original
information-providing system by assigning conversation to two speakers in the computer in
order to transfer knowledge to humans.
5. System implementation
The principle of Sophisticated Eliza is that because a large amount of text data is available,
even if the recall of information extraction is low, we can obtain sufficient information to
generate short conversations. However, the rules still need to be improved by careful
analysis of input texts.
