Yorick Wilks

• Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

The paper describes a prototype Embodied Conversational Agent or Companion, called CALONIS, for a brain-injured Veteran with severe cognitive impairment. The CALONIS project is a sub-project of the larger Tampa VA SmartHome implementation initiative. CALONIS is intended to provide increased engagement, diversion and assistance beyond the usual mech...

This Blue Sky presentation focuses on a major shift toward a notion of “ambient intelligence” that transcends general applications targeted at the general population. The focus is on highly personalized agents that accommodate individual differences and changes over time. This notion of Extended Ambient Intelligence (EAI) concerns adaptation to a p...

This Blue Sky presentation focuses on a major shift toward a notion of “ambient intelligence” that transcends general applications targeted at the general population. The focus is on highly personalized agents that accommodate individual differences and changes over time. This notion of Extended Ambient Intelligence (EAI) concerns adaptation to a p...

Author Preprint Copy, To Appear: Atkinson, David J., Dorr, Bonnie J., Clark, Micah H., Clancey, William J. and Wilks, Yorick. 2015. Ambient Personal Environment Experiment (APEX):. A Cyber-Human Prosthesis for Mental, Physical and Age-Related Disabilities. In Ambient Intelligence for Health and Cognitive Enhancement, Papers from the 2015 AAAI Sprin...

We present an emerging research project in our laboratory to extend ambient intelligence (AmI) by what we refer to as "extreme personalization" meaning that an instance of ambient intelligence is focused on one or at most a few individuals over a very long period of time. Over a lifetime of co-activity, it senses and adapts to a person's preference...

Individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) are at risk for reduced levels of independence, safety issues, falls, and institutionalization. VA SmartHome (SH) technology, developed for Veterans with TBI, uses an accurate indoor tracking technology capable of following numerous individuals simultaneously and resolving their location to approximatel...

Research on metaphor as a phenomenon amenable to the techniques of computational linguistics received a substantial boost from a recent US government funding initiative (iARPA, http:// www. iarpa. gov/ Programs/ ia/ Metaphor/ metaphor. html) that set up a number of teams in major universities to address the issues of metaphor detection and interpre...

We introduce the CUBISM system for the analysis and deep understanding of multi-participant dialogues. CUBISM brings together two typically separate forms of discourse analysis: semantic analysis and sociolinguistic analysis. In the paper proper, we describe and illustrate major components of the CUBISM system, and discuss the challenge posed by th...

The paper concerns a prototype MCA or Companion (called CALONIS, a Roman soldier's servant) for a brain-damaged Veteran with no long-term memory intended to provide engagement, diversion and assistance, but with some possibilities of therapy and aids in cognitive testing. Ethical issues arise from how a Companion presents itself in such a situation...

Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying the meanings of words in context. This article begins with discussing the origins of the problem in the earliest machine translation systems. Early attempts to solve the WSD problem suffered from a lack of coverage. The main approaches to tackle the problem were dictionary-based, connect...

The use of ontologies as representations of knowledge is widespread but their construction, until recently, has been entirely manual. We argue in this paper for the use of text corpora and automated natural language processing methods for the construction of ontologies. We delineate the challenges and present criteria for the selection of appropria...

Several dialogue management (DM) architectures and conversational speech for dialogue systems are presented. Basic types of DM systems include dialogue grammars and frames, plan-based and collaborative systems, and conversational games theory. DM architectures include SmartKom, Trindi, WITAS, CONVERSE, COMIC, agent-based dialogue management, and DM...

This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to:(1)The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase.(2)The conversion of the input to RDF for...

This chapter argues, briefly, that much work in formal Computational Semantics (alias CompSem) is not computational at all, and does not attempt to be; there is some mis-description going on here on a large and long-term scale. The aim of this chapter is to show that such work is not just misdescribed, but loses value because of the scientific impo...

COMPANIONS is a concept that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual 'Companion' to stand between individuals and the torrent of data on the Internet, including their own life information, which will soon be too large for people to handle easily without some new form of...

Companions are agents devised to accompany users day by day building long-term relationships with them. They do not only assist users for particular tasks in sporadic times, but they provide more support and have more information to adapt themselves to each users' needs. Currently, these agents and their possibilities are being researched as a part...

Embedded and wireless sensor networks are transforming research in the biosciences, environmental sciences, and other fields. However, these technologies also contribute significantly to the data deluge associated with e-Research and cyberinfrastructure activities. Embedded networked sensing research is a reflection of e-science and thus presents a...

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines. Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly pow...

It is commonly accepted that data is not the same as information, let alone knowledge. For instance, the numbering and photographing of the fins of thousands of dolphins would certainly be data, but doubtfully information of knowledge; a city's large phone directory is undoubtedly information, but hardly knowledge - and certainly not permanent or r...

This paper describes an initial prototype demonstrator of a Companion, designed as a platform for novel approaches to the following: 1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) phase, 2) The conversion of the input to Resource Descriptor Form...

I start from a perspective close to that of the EC COMPANIONS project, and set out its aim to model a new kind of human-computer relationship based on long-term interaction, with some tasks involved although a Companion should not be inherently task-based, since there need be no stopping point to its conversation. Some demonstration of its function...

The current state of dialogue technology has come a long way since its beginning in the 1950s: dialogue technology now provides interactive service agents, while research explores various aspects of multimodal and multiparty communication so as to improve natural and social aspects of dialogue systems. In this workshop, interest is focussed especia...

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contact...

CLAROS (Classical Art Research Online Services; www.clarosweb.org) is an international interdisciplinary research initiative led by the University of Oxford (Humanities and Mathematics and Physical Sciences), hosted by the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC, www.oerc.ox.ac.uk), and inspired by the Beazley Archive (www.beazley.ox.ac.uk) participating in...

Nothing in McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) target article deals with the issue of how the adaptivity, or some other aspect, of beliefs might become a biological adaptation; which is to say, how the functions discussed might be coded in such a way in the brain that their development was also coded in gametes or sex transmission cells.

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are...

COMPANIONS is an EU project that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual conversational 'Companion'. This is intended as an agent or 'presence' that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and 'knowing' its owners preferences and wishes....

The Senior Companion (SC) is a fully implemented Windows application intended for intermittent use by one user only (a senior citizen) over potentially many years. The thinking behind the SC is to make a device that will give its owner comfort, company, entertainment, and some practical functions. The SC will typically be installed at home, either...

The paper argues that Guarino is right that ontologies are different from thesauri and similar objects, but not in the ways he believes: they are distinguished from essentially linguistic objects like thesauri and hierarchies of conceptual relations because they unpack, ultimately, in terms of sets of objects and individuals. However this is a lone...

Machine Translation is the author's comprehensive view of machine translation (MT) from the perspective of a participant in its history and development. The text considers MT as a fundamental part of Artificial Intelligence and the ultimate test-bed for all computational linguistics, covering historical and contemporary systems in Europe, the US an...

This paper addresses the question of whether it is possible to sense-tag systematically, and on a large scale, and how we should assess progress so far. That is to say, how to attach each occurrence of a word in a text to one and only one sense in a dictionary-a particular dictionary of course, and that is part of the problem. The paper does not pr...

The paper describes a system of semantic analysis and generation, programmed in LISP 1.5 and designed to pass from paragraph length input in English to French via an interlingual representation. A wide class of English input forms will be covered, but the vocabulary will initially be restricted to one of a few hundred words. With this subset workin...

The main argument of this paper is that Natural Language Processing (NLP) does, and will continue to, underlie the Semantic Web (SW), including its initial construction from unstructured sources like the World Wide Web (WWW), whether its advocates realise this or not. Chiefly, we argue, such NLP activity is the only way up to a defensible notion of...

We propose a method for learning dialogue management policies from a fixed data set. The method addresses the challenges posed by Information State Update (ISU)-based dialogue systems, which represent the state of a dialogue as a large set of features, ...

The paper argues that Guarino is right that ontologies are different from thesauri and similar objects, but not in the ways he believes: they are distinguished from essentially linguistic objects like thesauri and hierarchies of conceptual relations because they unpack, ultimately, in terms of sets of objects and individuals. However this is a lone...

We present a mechanism to learn repeated substructures of dialogue from an appropriately annotated dialogue corpus. We hypothesised that we could automatically segment a dialogue corpus into ‘chunks ’ corresponding roughly to ‘game’-like structures. In our dialogue system we manage dialogue by employing a set of hand-crafted networks (ATNs) which w...

This article discusses what kind of entity the proposed Semantic Web (SW) is, principally by reference to the relationship of natural language structure to knowledge representation (KR). There are three distinct views on this issue. The first is that the SW is basically a renaming of the traditional AI KR task, with all its problems and challenges....

Many applications of computational linguistics are greatly influenced by the quality of corpora available and as automatically generated corpora continue to play an increasingly common role, it is essential that we not overlook the importance of well-constructed and homogeneous corpora. This paper describes an automatic approach to improving the ho...

We present recent work in the area of Cross-Domain Dialogue Act (DA) tagging. We have previously reported on the use of a simple dialogue act classifier based on purely intra-utterance features — principally involving word n-gram cue phrases automatically generated from a training corpus. Such a classifier performs surprisingly well, rivalling scor...

This paper discusses how Information Extraction is used to understand and manage Dialogue in the EU-funded Companions project. This will be discussed with respect to the Senior Companion, one of two applications under development in the EU-funded Companions project. Over the last few years, research in human-computer dialogue systems has increased...

This article presents a multi-agent dialogue system. We show how a collection of relatively simple agents is able to treat complex dialogue phenomena and deal successfully with different deployment configurations. We analyze our system regarding robustness and scalability. We show that it degrades gracefully under different failures and that the ar...

The paper tries to relate Wittgenstein's later writings about language with the history and content of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular, its sub-area normally called Computational Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing. It argues that the shift, since 1990, from rule-driven approaches to computational language and logic, associa...

This paper summarizes discussions at the multidisciplinary forum held at the University of Oxford on 26 October 2007 entitled Artificial Companions in Society: Perspectives on the Present and Future, as well as an open meeting the previous day addressed by Sherry Turkle. The event was organized by Yorick Wilks, Senior Research Fellow for the Oxford...

COMPANIONS is a major EU project that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing virtual conversational 'Companions', agents or 'presences' that stay with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and 'knowing' their owner's preferences and wishes. They will commu...

This paper describes part of the corpus collection efforts underway in the EC funded Companions project. The Companions project is collecting substantial quantities of dialogue a large part of which focus on reminiscing about photographs. The texts are in English and Czech. We describe the context and objectives for which this dialogue corpus is be...

Several research projects are closing in on ways to allow humans to effectively communicate with machines in natural language.

We suggest that the standard fine-grained division of senses and (larger) homographs by a lexicographer for use by a human reader may not be an appropriate goal for the computational WSD task. We argue that the level of sense-discrimination that natural language processing (NLP) needs corresponds roughly to homographs, though we discuss psycholingu...

In memory of Karen Spärck Jones, who contributed significantly to the information retrieval and natural language processing fields and, in her later years, was concerned with their relationship within general schemes of representation in AI. Also remembered is Jay Modi (1975-2007), an outstanding teacher and a rising star in the AI community.

The paper argues that the IBM statistical approach to machine translation has done rather better after a few years than many sceptics believed it could. However, it is neither as novel as its proponents suggest nor is it making claims as clear and simple as they would have us believe. The performance of the purely statistical system (and we discuss...

The paper surveys arguments from linguistics, artificial intelligence and philosophy about semantic primitives. It concentrates discussion on arguments of Charniak, Hayes, Putnam and Bobrow and Winograd; and suggests that many of the arguments against semantic primitives are based on no clear views about what the defenders are arguing for. The prop...

This paper describes a system of semantic analysis and generation, programmed in LISP 1.5 and designed to pass from paragraph-length input in English to French via an interlingual representation. A wide class of English input forms is covered, with a vocabulary initially restricted to a few hundred words. The distinguishing features of the translat...

This paper describes work on the detection of anomalous material in text. We show several vari- ants of an automatic technique for identifying an 'unusual' segment within a document, and consider texts which are unusual because of author, genre (Biber, 1998), topic or emotional tone. We evaluate the technique using many experiments over large docum...

This paper presents an alternative algo- rithm based on the singular value decom- position (SVD) that creates vector rep- resentation for linguistic units with re- duced dimensionality. The work was mo- tivated by an application aimed to repre- sent text segments for further processing in a multi-document summarization sys- tem. The algorithm tries...

This article discusses the extension of ViewGen, an algorithm derived for belief ascription, to the areas of intensional object identification and metaphor. ViewGen represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition sets known as environments. Environments are convenient, even essential, for addressing important pragmatic issues...

The paper discusses the incorporation of richer semantic structures into the Preference Semantics system: they are called pseudo-texts and capture something of the information expressed in one type of frame proposed by Minsky (q.v.). However, they are in a format, and subject to rules of inference, consistent with earlier accounts of this system of...

The paper describes the way in which a Preference Semantics system for natural language analysis and generation tackles a difficult class of anaphoric inference problems: those requiring either analytic (conceptual) knowledge of a complex sort, or requiring weak inductive knowledge of the course of events in the real world. The method employed conv...

The paper describes a working analysis and generation program for natural language, which handles paragraph length input. Its core is a system of preferential choice between deep semantic patterns, based on what we call ‘‘semantic density.’’ The system is contrasted: (1) with syntax oriented linguistic approaches, and (2) with theorem proving appro...

Machine readable dictionaries (mrds) contain knowledge about language and the world essential for tasks in natural language processing (nlp). However, this knowledge, collected and recorded by lexicographers for human readers, is not presented in a manner for mrds to be used directly for NLP tasks. What is badly needed are machine tractable diction...

Natural Language Processing as a Foundation of the Semantic Web argues that Natural Language Processing (NLP) does, and will continue to, underlie the Semantic Web (SW), including its initial construction from unstructured sources like the World Wide Web, in several different ways, and whether its advocates realise this or not. Chiefly, it argues,...

The fundamental failure of current approaches to ontology learning is to view it as single pipeline with one or more specific inputs and a single static output. In this paper, we present a novel approach to ontology learning which takes an iterative view of knowledge acquisition for ontologies. Our approach is founded on three open-ended resources:...

This research report seeks to connect the future of the Internet to a new, even though relatively developed, technology; that of computer speech and language and its embodiment in a concept I shall call an Artificial Companion. I will argue here that such entities are coming into being and that they will change fairly rapidly from the rather primit...

The paper discusses what kind of entity the proposed Semantic Web (SW) is, in terms of the relationship of natural language structure to knowledge representation (KR). It argues that there are three distinct views on the issue: first, that the SW is basically a renaming of the traditional AI knowledge representation task, with all the problems and...

The frequency of occurrence of words in natural languages exhibits a periodic and a non-periodic component when analysed as a time series. This work presents an unsupervised method of extracting perio-dicity information from text, enabling time series creation and filtering to be used in the creation of sophisticated lan-guage models that can disce...

The incorporation of Semantic Web (SW) in AI systems that could provide meaning to the 'upper level' concepts in ontologies, which are used in language processing and scientific knowledge structures, is discussed. SW is a growing together of the conceptual levels based on the name spaces and concept triples derived from texts. It is a development o...

As web searches increase, there is a need to represent the search results in the most comprehensible way possible. In particular, we focus on search results from queries about people and places. The standard method for presentation of search results is an ordered list determined by the Web search engine. Although this is satisfactory in some cases,...

We describe our participation in the Mul-tilingual Summarization Evaluation MSE 2006 where multiple documents in Eng-lish, Arabic and Arabic-English machine translations are used to create a brief 100 word summary in English. Our system output was evaluated using the automated ROUGE evaluation system. The greedy optimization technique used to ensur...

Data sparsity is a large problem in natural language processing that refers to the fact that language is a system of rare events, so varied and complex, that even using an extremely large corpus, we can never accurately model all possible strings of words. This paper examines the use of skip-grams (a technique where by n-grams are still stored to m...