Researchers at the University of Arizona and Carnegie Mellon University are working to create a robot receptionist. What makes the effort novel is that the "roboceptionist" is bilingual and bicultural – a computer with a face and a natural language interface.
Hala wll be more flexible in dealing with language input from users. And that is where the University of Arizona comes in. We will provide both the language-specific and inter-language-related cultural capabilities so that this robot can be not just bilingual, but bicultural."
It is a bicultural robot is not one that merely switches between English and Arabic, Hala's current format, but also has both modes simultaneously active in order to spot and deal with potential cultural ambiguities and misunderstandings.
"You may speak Arabic, but you may choose to converse with the robot in English. "You may be conversing with the sensibility and the cultural background and the idioms from the Arabic world. This robot needs to understand both."
The phrase "week after week," for example, "I'm looking for the group that meets week after week" means "every week" in English. But in some Arabic dialects it can mean "every other week." Only a robot that is simultaneously facile with both lexicons can compute that this phrase is subject to cultural variation and can ask the user for clarification.
Culture affects not only the syntax and semantics of an interaction, but also the structure of the interaction, from the way greetings and closings are performed, to the form of the language used to politeness strategies.
Hala, who has a built-in backstory and personality, will adjust responses based on cues from the visitor, essentially building a model of the user throughout the interaction: Is this person high-status? Is this person American? Is this person in a hurry?
Most natural language parsers – computer translators that check for correct syntax – are trained on what is known as a Treebank corpora, or parsed sentences, generally from newswire text. News stories, however, do not usually contain questions, greetings or dialog.
The possible applications of this work for other human-computer interaction systems is also driving the research. Fong thinks the technology could be applicable to computer help-agents, multicultural information kiosks, tour guides and automated international call centers.
Source: On This Page
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