Affecting People with Natural Language
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Aberdeen
Department Name: Computing Science
Abstract
Documents written in natural languages like English are increasingly being written by computers as well as people, and computer-written documents are used routinely in many specialised applications, such as weather forecasting.Unfortunately computer models of natural language generation have a relatively poor idea about how individual readers differ and which ways of saying things will be most appropriate for which readers. As a result, they are ill-suited to more challenging tasks, such as persuading a patient to give up smoking of using humour to change someone's beliefs about the significance of globall warming. These are tasks where the goal of the text is to affect the reader in a much deeper way than just to give them some important facts.The proposed research aims to improve NLG technology in terms both of sensitivity to the reader and also of the range of effects that can be achieved. For this, it is necessary for experts in the technology of NLG to learn from researchers in other fields, for instance psychology and user modelling, and for NLG researchers in turn to increase the robustness and generality of the technology to meet the new challenges.
Organisations
Publications
Tintarev N
(2012)
Evaluating the effectiveness of explanations for recommender systems Methodological issues and empirical studies on the impact of personalization
in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
Van Deemter K
(2008)
Fully generated scripted dialogue for embodied agents
in Artificial Intelligence
WILLIAMS S
(2008)
Generating basic skills reports for low-skilled readers
in Natural Language Engineering
Paraboni I
(2007)
Generating Referring Expressions: Making Referents Easy to Identify
in Computational Linguistics
Piwek P
(2008)
Generating under Global Constraints: The Case of Scripted Dialogue
in Research on Language and Computation
Van Deemter K
(2012)
Generation of referring expressions: assessing the Incremental Algorithm.
in Cognitive science
VARGES S
(2010)
Instance-based natural language generation
in Natural Language Engineering
DORR B
(2010)
Interlingual annotation of parallel text corpora: a new framework for annotation and evaluation
in Natural Language Engineering
Khan IH
(2012)
Managing ambiguity in reference generation: the role of surface structure.
in Topics in cognitive science
Mellish C
(2008)
Natural language directed inference from ontologies
in Artificial Intelligence