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Next generation question answering systems are challenged on many fronts including but not limited to massive, heterogeneous and sometimes streaming collections, diverse and challenging users, and the need to be sensitive to context, ambiguity, and even deception. This chapter describes new directions in question answering (QA) including enhanced question processing, source selection, document retrieval, answer determination, and answer presentation generation. We consider important directions such as answering questions in context (e.g., previous queries, day or time, the data, the task, location of the interactive device), scenario based QA, event and temporal QA, spatial QA, opinionoid QA, multimodal QA, multilingual QA, user centered and collaborative QA, explanation, interactive QA, QA reuse, and novel architectures for QA. The chapter concludes by outlining a roadmap of the future of question answering, articulating necessary resources for, impediments to, and planned or possible future capabilities.

In this paper we present language technology enhancements to audio-based information services (i.e. services where information is presented using spoken language). The enhancements presented in the paper addresses two issues for audio-based services: 1) interaction with the service is rigid and 2) the ability to listen to summaries is limited. Our developments allow for more natural and efficient control of the service and means that facilitates skim reading. Using speech dialogue instead of traditional buttons provides means for more advanced navigation in the audio material. Vector space techniques are used to collect the most relevant sentences in a text and allows for skim reading of varying depth.

We report on a design exploration into how a large multi-touchtabletop display can be used for information visualization. Wedesigned an interface where users explored a tagged photocollection by bi-manual manipulation of the collections’ tagcloud. User feedback showed that despite the availability ofmulti-touch most of the actual interactions were single-touch.However, some particular natural actions, such as grabbing thetag cloud and partitioning it into two parts, were often carriedwith both hands. Thus our user study indicates that multi-touchcan act as a useful complementary interaction method ininformation visualization interfaces.

We present results from using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for automatic handling of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). FAQs have a high language variability and include a mixture of technical and non-technical terms. LSA has a potential to be useful for automatic handling of FAQ as it reduces the linguistic variability and capture semantically related concept. It is also easy to adapt for FAQ. LSA does not require any sophisticated linguistic analyses and merely involves various vector operations. We evaluate LSA for FAQ on a corpus comprising 4905 FAQ items from a collection of 65000 mail conversations. Our results show that Latent Semantic Analysis, without linguistic analyses, gives results that are on par other methods for automatic FAQ.

This paper presents a corpus-based study on prolongations inspontaneous Mandarin. Prolongations are mainly produced forhesitation, but also for emphasizing a discourse focus and signalling an explicit feedback. 786 prolongation occurrences are investigated in terms of the position, the part of speech andthe segment and tone types. Prolongations are often found in word-final, phrase-final and utterance-medial positions. It is more likely to prolong in function words than in content words.However, in the case of monosyllabic words prolongations are more frequently found in function words, but in the remaining cases prolongations are more likely to be found in content words. Prolongations in transitive verbs, adverbs, nouns andparticles show particularly high rates, while prolongations inintransitive verbs and aspectual adverbs are really rare. Especially, there is no prolonged adjective. Consonants arerarely prolonged in Mandarin and no particular effect is found for lexical tones.

Languages have always been influenced by other languages in various ways, through cultural contacts, migration, trade and other channels. In an increasingly internationalized world, where contacts across national borders are commonplace, sometimes politically driven/pushed by bodies such as the EU, foreign language influences have become stronger than ever. Moreover, besides cultural influx through media such as TV and radio, multilingual automatic applications have become an important area of study for automatic speech recognition services, raising issues like how Germans pronounce French place names, and vice versa (Trancoso et al., 1999). Similarly, automatic speech synthesis also needs to cover pronunciation of foreign items, which has been observed by e. g. Eklund & Lindstr?m (1996; 1998; 2001) and M?bius et al. (1997). While speech recognition and speech synthesis mainly are affected by "foreignness" of speech sounds, languages are also influenced at other linguistic levels, such as vocabulary, idioms such as'catch-phrases'and'buzz-words', translated or original expressions and so on, as observed by e. g. Ljung (1988)

Languages have always been influenced by other languages in various ways, through cultural contacts, migration, trade and other channels. In an increasingly internationalized world, where contacts across national borders are commonplace, sometimes politically driven/pushed by bodies such as the EU, foreign language influences have become stronger than ever. Moreover, besides cultural influx through media such as TV and radio, multilingual automatic applications have become an important area of study for automatic speech recognition services, raising issues like how Germans pronounce French place names, and vice versa (Trancoso et al., 1999). Similarly, automatic speech synthesis also needs to cover pronunciation of foreign items, which has been observed by e.g. Eklund & Lindström (1996; 1998; 2001) and Möbius et al. (1997). While speech recognition and speech synthesis mainly are affected by “foreignness” of speech sounds, languages are also influenced at other linguistic levels, such as vocabulary, idioms such as ‘catch-phrases’ and ‘buzz-words’, translated or original expressions and so on, as observed by e.g. Ljung (1988).

In order to provoke a debate about the use of new technology, the Snatcher Catcher, an intrusive interactive refrigerator that keeps record of the items in it, was created. In this paper we present the fridge, and how we used it in a provocative installation. The results showed that the audience was provoked, and that few people wanted to have the fridge in their surroundings.

This paper presents, Dabire, a romanized transcription scheme which is based on the phonology and morphophonology of Persian. Dabire uses an extended Latin alphabet and a number of conventions with the aim of providing a simple, consistent and easy to learn writing system.

This paper describes a syllabification based conversion method for converting romanized Persian text to the traditional Arabic-based writing system. The system is implemented in Xerox XFST and relies on rule based conversion of words rather than using morphological analysis. The paper presents a brief evaluation of the accuracy of the transcriptions generated by the method.

This paper presents a method for converting back and forth between the Perso-Arabic and a romanized writing system for Persian. Given a word in one writing system, we use finite state transducers to generate morphological analysis for the word that is subsequently used to regenerate the orthography of the word in the other writing system. The system has been implemented in XFST and LEXC.

This paper presents a method for converting back and forth between the Perso-Arabic and a romanized writing system for Persian. Given a word in one writing system, we use finite state transducers to generate morphological analysis for the word that is subsequently used to regenerate the orthography of the word in the other writing system. The system has been implemented in XFST and LEXC.

We present results of the collaboration of a multinational team of researchers from (computational) linguistics, medicine, and medical informatics with the goal of building a multilingual medical lexicon with high coverage and complete morpho-syntactic information. Monolingual lexical resources were collected and subsequently mapped between languages using a morpho-semantic term normalization engine, which captures intra- as well as interlingual synonymy relationships on the level of subwords.

This paper presents how word alignment techniques could be used for building standardized term banks. It is shown that time and effort could be saved by a relatively simple evaluation metric based on frequency data from term pairs, and source and target distributions inside the alignment results. The proposed Q-value metric is shown to outperform other tested metrics such as Dice's coefficient, and simple pair frequency.

Several methods can be applied to create a set of validated terms from existing documents. In this paper we describe an automatic bilingual term candidate extraction method, and the validation process used to create a hierarchical patent terminology. The process described was used to extract terms from patent texts, commissioned by the Swedish Patent Office with the purpose of using the terms for machine translation. Information on the correct linguistic inflection patterns and hierarchical partitioning of terms based on their use are of utmost importance.The process contains six phases, 1) Analysis of the source material and system configuration; 2) Term candidate extraction; 3) Term candidate filtering and initial linguistic validation; 4) Manual validation by domain experts; 5) Final linguistic validation; and 6) Publishing the validated terms.Input to the extraction process consisted of more than 91 000 patent document pairs in English and Swedish, 565 million words in English and 450 million words in Swedish. The English documents were supplied in EBD SGML format and the Swedish documents were supplied in OCR processed scans of patent documents. After grammatical and statistical analysis, the documents were word-aligned. Using the word-aligned material, candidate terms were extracted based on linguistic patterns. 750 000 term candidates were extracted and stored in a relational database. The term candidates were processed in 8 months resulting in 181 000 unique validated term pairs that were exported into several hierarchically organized OLIF files.

Augmented Reality has potential to support collaboration in complex situations, such as command and control. Unfortunately there are few studies on how such systems should be designed to facilitate cooperation between actors from different organisations and at the same time support individual actors needs. This poster presents an iterative design process of an Augmented Reality system for a collaborative task.

This paper presents results from a study on using an AR application to support collaborative command and control activities requiring the collaboration of three different civil service organisations. The technology is used to create a common ground between the organisations and allows the users to interact, plan resources and react to the ongoing events on a digital map. The AR application was developed and evaluated in a study where a forest fire scenario was simulated. Participants from the involved organisations acted as command and control teams in the simulated scenario and both quantitative and qualitative results were obtained. The results show that AR can become a useful tool in these situations in the future.

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Lexicography is a realm of growing academic specialization. Dictionaries map meaning onto use. We have innumerable dictionaries on different subjects and for different purposes which we keep referring to, time and again. Despite the frequency with which dictionaries are unquestioningly consulted, many have little idea of what actually goes into making them or how meanings are definitively ascertained. We have become so accustomed to using dictionaries that we fail to take notice of the effort and time spent in their making. Understanding the finer nuances of the art of dictionary-making will be of interest to everyone. With changing times and the penetration of technology, the bulkier forms of dictionaries have given way to softer forms. This book updates the reader to the changing notions of the lexicon and dictionary-making in the new realm of modern technology and newer electronic tools. The book introduces us to lexicography and leads us to dictionaries for general and specific purposes. It examines dictionary compilation and research and enables compilers, users, educators and publishers to look anew at the art of lexicography. It duly takes into account the fact that dictionaries are meant to fulfill the needs of specific user groups and reflects the same in the chapters devoted to various professional dictionaries, which have recently achieved widespread recognition in the lexicographical literature. A good read for students of linguistics, teachers and translators apart from general readers interested in knowing the intricate art of making a dictionary.

Background: This paper reports on a parallel collection of rubrics from the medical terminology systems ICD-10, ICF, MeSH, NCSP and KSH97-P and its use for semi-automatic creation of an English-Swedish dictionary of medical terminology. The methods presented are relevant for many other West European language pairs than English-Swedish. Methods: The medical terminology systems were collected in electronic format in both English and Swedish and the rubrics were extracted in parallel language pairs. Initially, interactive word alignment was used to create training data from a sample. Then the training data were utilised in automatic word alignment in order to generate candidate term pairs. The last step was manual verification of the term pair candidates. Results: A dictionary of 31,000 verified entries has been created in less than three man weeks, thus with considerably less time and effort needed compared to a manual approach, and without compromising quality. As a side effect of our work we found 40 different translation problems in the terminology systems and these results indicate the power of the method for finding inconsistencies in terminology translations. We also report on some factors that may contribute to making the process of dictionary creation with similar tools even more expedient. Finally, the contribution is discussed in relation to other ongoing efforts in constructing medical lexicons for non-English languages. Conclusion: In three man weeks we were able to produce a medical English-Swedish dictionary consisting of 31,000 entries and also found hidden translation errors in the utilized medical terminology systems. © 2006 Nyström et al, licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Background. Automatic word alignment of parallel texts with the same content in different languages is among other things used to generate dictionaries for new translations. The quality of the generated word alignment depends on the quality of the input resources. In this paper we report on automatic word alignment of the English and Swedish versions of the medical terminology systems ICD-10, ICF, NCSP, KSH97-P and parts of MeSH and how the terminology systems and type of resources influence the quality. Methods. We automatically word aligned the terminology systems using static resources, like dictionaries, statistical resources, like statistically derived dictionaries, and training resources, which were generated from manual word alignment. We varied which part of the terminology systems that we used to generate the resources, which parts that we word aligned and which types of resources we used in the alignment process to explore the influence the different terminology systems and resources have on the recall and precision. After the analysis, we used the best configuration of the automatic word alignment for generation of candidate term pairs. We then manually verified the candidate term pairs and included the correct pairs in an English-Swedish dictionary. Results. The results indicate that more resources and resource types give better results but the size of the parts used to generate the resources only partly affects the quality. The most generally useful resources were generated from ICD-10 and resources generated from MeSH were not as general as other resources. Systematic inter-language differences in the structure of the terminology system rubrics make the rubrics harder to align. Manually created training resources give nearly as good results as a union of static resources, statistical resources and training resources and noticeably better results than a union of static resources and statistical resources. The verified English-Swedish dictionary contains 24,000 term pairs in base forms. Conclusion. More resources give better results in the automatic word alignment, but some resources only give small improvements. The most important type of resource is training and the most general resources were generated from ICD-10. © 2007 Nyström et al, licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

The area of multimodal interaction is fast growing, and is showing promising results in making the interaction more efficient and Robust. These results are mainly based on better recognizers, and studies of how users interact with particular multimodal systems. However, little research has been done on users- subjective experience of using multimodal interfaces, which is an important aspect for acceptance of multimodal interfaces. The work presented in this thesis focuses on how users experience multimodal interaction, and what qualities are important for the interaction. Traditional user interfaces and speech and multimodal interfaces are often described as having different interaction character (handlingskaraktär). Traditional user interfaces are often seen as tools, while speech and multimodal interfaces are often described as dialogue partners. Researchers have ascribed different qualities as important for performance and satisfaction for these two interaction characters. These statements are examined by studying how users react to a multimodal timetable system. In this study spoken feedback was used to make the interaction more human-like. A Wizard-of-Oz method was used to simulate the recognition and generation engines in the timetable system for public transportation. The results from the study showed that users experience the system having an interaction character, and that spoken feedback influences that experience. The more spoken feedback the system gives, the more users will experience the system as a dialogue partner. The evaluation of the qualities of interaction showed that user preferred no spoken feedback, or elaborated spoken feedback. Limited spoken feedback only distracted the users. 

We developed and studied an experimental system, RealTourist, which lets a user to plan a conference trip with the help of a remote tourist consultant who could view the tourist's eye-gaze superimposed onto a shared map. Data collected from the experiment were analyzed in conjunction with literature review on speech and eye-gaze patterns. This inspective, exploratory research identified various functions of gaze-overlay on shared spatial material including: accurate and direct display of partner's eye-gaze, implicit deictic referencing, interest detection, common focus and topic switching, increased redundancy and ambiguity reduction, and an increase of assurance, confidence, and understanding. This study serves two purposes. The first is to identify patterns that can serve as a basis for designing multimodal human-computer dialogue systems with eye-gaze locus as a contributing channel. The second is to investigate how computer-mediated communication can be supported by the display of the partner's eye-gaze.