German Competence Center

in Speech and Language Technology

J. Capstick, T. Declerck, G. Erbach,A. Jameson, B. Jörg, R. Karger,H. Uszkoreit, W. Wahlster, T. Wegst

LREC, Las Palmas, 30 May 2002

Project COLLATE

Theme: Computational Linguistics and Language Technology for

Real World Applications

Support: A Grant by the

German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) for RTD

strengthening the position of Saarbrücken as a Competence

Center for Language

Technology

PIs: Hans Uszkoreit, Manfred Pinkal and Wolfgang Wahlster

Duration: Spring 2001 - end of 2003

COLLATE Project Structure

informationextractionand fusion

dialogue forknowledge

access

informationmanagementand retrieval

basic functionalities of LT-basedknowledge management

Virtual Information

Center

Demonstration Center

EvaluationCenter

Competence Center in Speech and Language Technologze

Coordination, Controlling, Reporting, WWW Presence, PR, EventsCoordination, Controlling, Reporting, WWW Presence, PR, Events

Need for a Competence Center

LT field is growing Researchers from LT and neighbouring disciplines need a

comprehensive information service Users of LT need in-depth information about technologies,

available products and suppliers Users of LT need support to find or develop solutions

meeting their application requirements Developers and users of LT need criteria and evaluations

regarding the usability of LT in real world applications Students of LT need an information source

1. Virtual Information Center: LT World

LT World: Idea and Context

The virtual information center is a comprehensive WWW-based information and knowledge service for the entire area of language technology.

LT World is a “virtual” center in the sense that most information will physically remain with their creators or with other service providers.

The virtual information center has been online since October 2001 under the name „LT World“ for „Language Technology World“ (www.lt-world.org)

Virtual Information Center - LT World

Information and Knowledge

Technical and Scientific Information

Players and Teams

Persons, Projects, Organisations

Resources and Results

Research Systems, Commercial Products

Communication and Events

News, Conferences

LT World Ontology

Publications

Products Projects People

Layer 2: Specific Ontologies

Corpora etc.

Layer 1: Dublin Core

Layer 3: Ontology for CL & LT

LT World: Coverage

99 topic nodes

300 NLP tools and products

1800 people

850 organisations

500 projects

Data Acquisition Process

Manual collection, categorization and annotation of URLs by students and staff

Sources: conference proceedings and journals, lists of links on the web,

Self-registration and correction of data by users of the service

Technical/scientific information in topic nodes has been provided by domain experts

LT World: Topic Nodes

Topic nodes are the main information unit of the Area “Knowledge and Information”. They are organized in a shallow slightly multidimensional hierarchy following the chapter plan of the second edition of the Language Technology Survey

Example of the shallow hierarchy

Information Extraction• Named Entity Recognition

• Terminology Extraction

• Relation Extraction

• Answer Extraction

Information for each Topic

Name

Acronyms

aka‘s, Term Translations

Short Definition

Overview Article (from HLT Survey)

Topic Websites

R&D Prototypes/Products

Projects

People

Literature

Hyperlinking between Sections

Relationship to External Resources

Included but autonomous resources: ACL Software Registry, Language Technology Survey

Systematically cross-Linked and Cross-Searchable Resources: all OLAC Resources such as (LDC, ELRA , SIL, ACL SR, and OLAC Home)

Systematically crosslinked resources: HLT Central, ELSNET, ACL NLP Universe, EACL, COLIBRI

Linked resources: All other relevant resources relevant for LT

Future Work: Virtual Information Center

Update of Information and Knowledge section in cooperation with 2nd edtion of HLT Survey

Interaction (chatrooms, discussion boards) Job offers

Use of language technologies to improve the content of LT World Improved hyperlinking between the different sections Resource discovery Automatic metadata extraction Construct corpus of LT area as R&D resource

2. Demonstration Center

Demonstration Center

Ppotential users and other interested parties can see and test the most important research prototypes and products of language technology

The demo center is available for seminars, tutorials, and information visits

Beneficiaries are: companies and other organizations interested in the deployment of language technology, researchers and developers of language technology, other decision makers with an interest in the state of the art in LT

Demonstration Center: Technical Setup

PC-based demonstration kiosks

Audio-visual network allows redirection of voice and video in/output between kiosks

Specially equipped room for in-depth demonstrations

Demo scripts and data for different kinds of applications

Demonstration Center: Installed Software

Machine Translation (LOGOS, Linguatec Personal Translator ...)

Spoken dialogue system (Sympalog, Nuance, Speechworks...)

Text to speech synthesis (RealSpeak, Mary ...) Information Extraction (LaSIE, SPPC, ...) Dictation System (Dragon NR, L&H ASR 16, ...) Finite State Tools (XEROX XLE ...) Multimedia Indexing and Search (MUMUS ...) Spellchecking for professional users (CLT Corrigo ...) Voice Dialling (VoiceDirector)

.....

Future Work: Demonstration Center

New software is acquired and existing software updated

Information days and seminars (starting autumn 2002)

3. Evaluation Center

Evaluation Center: Idea

Development of methodology for an individual customized evaluation of LT applications

The focus is neither general technology evaluation (TREC, TIPSTER etc.) nor generic product testing according to a fixed set of criteria

The focus of the evaluation center is a thorough, customized and goal specific evaluation of individual applications. The evaluation will center on usability, interoperability, and adequacy with respect to specified tasks.

Evaluation Center: Usability Studies

Evaluation of the overall usability of LT systems for real users in typical contexts

Current focus is on studying the interaction of users with LT applications, making use of a portable eye-tracker

Combination of eye-tracking and user interviews yields new insights into usability design

Initial Version of User Interface

Improved Version of User Interface

Conclusion

Thanks to the funding by BMBF and thanks to existing valuable resources such as the HLT Survey and the ACL Software Registry, we have set up the most comprehensive information resource on Language Technology.

We welcome any comments and proposals for collaboration that could help to strengthen LT World and the entire infostructure of our field.

Demonstration center and evaluation center provide useful services to developers and users of LT.

http://www.lt-cc.org/