Speaking the users' languages

• Published in: IEEE intelligent systems Vol. 18; no. 1; pp. 40 - 45
• Main Authors: Isard, A., Oberlander, J., Matheson, C., Androutsopoulos, I.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamitos IEEE 01-01-2003; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Application software; Artificial intelligence; Business; Cultural differences; Descriptions; Grammars; Graphics; Historic artifacts; Labeling; Linguistics; Marketing and sales; Mobile communication; Modular; Natural languages; Sentences; Speech recognition; Speech synthesis; Texts; Usability
• ISSN: 1541-1672; 1941-1294
• DOI: 10.1109/MIS.2003.1179192

The authors describe a system that generates descriptions of museum objects tailored to the user. The texts presented to adults, children, and experts differ in several ways, from the choice of words used to the complexity of the sentence forms. M-PIRO can currently generate text in three languages: English, Greek, and Italian. The grammar resources are language independent as much as possible. M-PIRO's system architecture is significantly more modular than that of its predecessor ILEX. In particular, the linguistic resources, database, and user-modeling subsystems are now separate from the systems that perform the natural language generation and speech synthesis.