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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 1991

How to ask a foreigner questions without knowing his language ? Proposal for a conceptual interface to communicate thought

Michael Zock
Ruslan Mitkov
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

While much work has been devoted on how to answer questions, little work has been done on how to ask them. We shall discuss in this paper an extension of a system that tries to take into account the following two facts : (a) people learning a natural language usually know what they want to say (content), what they do not know is how to say it, (b) languages learnt in a natural setting are a byproduct of learning facts abouth the world rather than a matter learnt for its own sake. SWIM is an exploratory environment for students learning French. The student asks the questions and the system answers them. This kind of approach raises an interesting problem, namely, how to ask questions in a language one doesn't speak yet ? While at present the system allows only for a limited range of questions, we shall discuss later in this paper an extension that should allow for an open ended dialogue on various topics (history of France, sport events, etc.). In order to achieve this goal, the system must be equipped with the following components : a database, a reasoning component, a generator for the output, and a conceptual interface for the input (what to say). We shall discuss in this paper a small part of the latter: how to ask (generate) questions. By providing the student with such an interface and a database, we hope to enable him to learn a language by learning facts about the world.
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hal-03175829 , version 1 (21-03-2021)

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Michael Zock, Ruslan Mitkov. How to ask a foreigner questions without knowing his language ? Proposal for a conceptual interface to communicate thought. Natural Language Processing Pacific RIM Symposium, 1991, Singapore, Singapore. ⟨hal-03175829⟩
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