Computing Science Seminar. Power on "Ontology authoring through dialogue"

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Computing Science Seminar. Power on "Ontology authoring through dialogue"
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This is a past event

A presentation with demos of dialogue applications to build ontologies.

Abstract:

I will describe and demonstrate two prototype applications which allow a user to build an ontology through a dialogue in a controlled natural language. The dialogue between user and program is conducted through an instant messaging interface. At present it consists of two-part exchanges: the user enters a statement (or question, or request, etc.) and the program displays a response, as well as possibly altering the ontology (e.g., adding or retracting axioms). I argue that although these are early experiments, they show the interest of the task, both theoretically (as a contribution to the formal theory of dialogue) and practically (as a novel technique for interacting with knowledge-based systems).

Bio:

Richard Power obtained his PhD at Edinburgh in 1974 with a thesis entitled "A Computer Model of Conversation". After several years as a post-doc at Sussex University he moved to Padua, Italy, where among other things he worked for a company developing financial expert systems. Returning to the UK in 1993 he worked on Natural Language Generation, first at the University of Brighton, and since 2005 at the Open University. His main contributions have been in NLG-based knowledge authoring, constraint-based generation, and ontology authoring for the semantic web (SWAT project). Recently, to close the circle, he has returned to his original interest of dialogue, this time as a means of authoring ontologies -- the subject of this seminar.

 

Speaker
Richard Power
Hosted by
Artemis Parvizi
Venue
MT 203