Natural Language Dialogue as Knowledge Base Editing

Paul Piwek, Roger Evans and Richard Power
ITRI - Information Technology Research Institute
University of Brighton
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4GJ, UK
+44 1273 64 29 16
+44 1273 64 29 08
Paul.Piwek@itri.brighton.ac.uk

In recent years, a technique (called WYSIWYM, for What You See is What You Meant) has been develloped at the ITRI in Brighton for editing knowledge bases. The idea is simple: a natural language text is generated from the current contents of a knowledge base. The text contains anchors with pop-up menus. A menu presents the possible extensions of the knowledge base. On the basis of the extension that the user selects, the knowledge base is updated and a feedback text is generated from the new contents of the knowledge base.

In the talk we describe how WYSIWYM can be integrated with a dialogue system. The user formulates queries by editing a knowledge base, which also keeps track of previous contributions to the dialogue by both user and system. We demonstrate how this approach allows us to deal with cross-speaker anaphora in dialogue.

A first prototype has been built of a multi-lingual legal information system for maritime law, as part of the CLIME (Computerized Legal Information Management and Explanation) project. The project is funded by the EC Esprit programme.