[ Current Projects | Past Projects ]
DSAMRD
Detecting Social Actions and Roles in Multiparty Dialogue
Homepage: http://www.ils.albany.edu/dsarmd.html
Dates: 2009 - 2012
Funding: iARPA
The DSARMD project (Detecting Social Actions and Roles in Multiparty Dialogue) investigates the dynamics of small group interactions across media, cultures and languages. Specifically, we are developing computational models of how certain social phenomena such as leadership, power, and conflict are signaled and reflected in language through the choice of lexical, syntactic, semantic and conversational forms by discourse participants in face-to-face discourse and in on-line interaction. Our objective is to build a prototype system that given a representative segment of multiparty task-oriented dialogue would automatically detect, with a high degree of accuracy, those social and cultural elements in language and discourse structure that are commonly associated with (a) conflict and disagreement, (b) power and dominance and (c) leadership.
DeER
Deliberative E-Rule Making Decision Facilitation Project
Homepage: http://www.ils.albany.edu/deer.html/
Dates: 2007 - 2010
Funding: National Science Foundation
By exploiting advances in question answering technology, discourse tracking, topic detection and summarization, we will present a suite of tools to enable online, collaborative deliberative decision making, providing a facilitation agent able to overcome traditional limitations in the online deliberative process.
Social Robotics
Homepage: http://www.socialrobotics.net/
Dates: 2007 - 2009
Funding: National Science Foundation
This awards brings together researchers and educators from UAlbany's ILS, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Schenectady County Community College, Union College and the Schenectady Museum and Suits-Bueche Planetarium. Students will utilize robots as a platform to learn key computer science concepts, begin to program, and learn about both hardware and software and the interplay between the two as part of a multi-school effort to deliver a unique educational experience for the Capital Region.
COMPANIONS
Homepage: http://www.companions-project.org/
Dates: 2006 - 2011
Funding: EU 6th Framework Program
To make computer interfaces more human-like has been a longstanding goal of human-computer interaction research, which has influenced all major areas of Multimodal Interfaces, from speech understanding to emotion recognition. This endeavour has given rise to the concept of agent-based interfaces, ones in which the user communicates with a virtual character using multimodal dialogue.
These are often referred to as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), to emphasise how the use of a character could focus natural language interaction as well as the affective component of the interface. The context of the COMPANIONS project concerns ECAs as persistent companions for users in carrying out activities within their personal digital space, such as organising image and text records of their lives as coherent narratives. This will require extending multimodal dialogue capabilities to support the social and affective aspects of interaction, as well as to give them specific cognitive capabilities, so as to support their relation to the user and organise information. The emotional aspects of the interface will be similarly grounded in the linguistic performance of human-computer dialogue, extended to such aspects as politeness and humour.
COLLANE
The Collaborative Analytical Environment
Homepage: http://www.ils.albany.edu/collane.html
Dates: 2006 - 2008
Funding: DTO
This project aims at developing advanced information access and analysis tools that exploit the strength of collaborative analysis through the interactive support environment where individual users can take advantage not only of the system's capabilities to rapidly filter and locate relevant information, but also from each other's actions and insights. The goal is to create an environment where groups of analysts can work together effectively on complex intelligence problems.
HITIQA Phase III
High-Quality Interactive Question Answering
Homepage: http://www.hitiqa.albany.edu/
Dates: 2006 - 2008
Funding: DTO
HITIQA is a question-answering system, driven by natural language human-computer dialogue. HITIQA is sponsored by the Advanced Research Development Activity (ARDA), which is an intelligence community center for conducting advanced research and development related to information technology. HITIQA is also a component of ARDA's Advanced Question and Answering for Intelligence (AQUAINT). Presently, intelligence analysts could use current query systems that search databases through a document retrieval system with structured queries, but none of these systems would equal the convenience and directness of HITIQA. HITIQA was developed by a team of researchers at the University at Albany, and Rutgers University.
AMITIES
Automated Multilingual Interaction with Information and Services
Homepage: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/nlp/amities/
Dates: 2001 - 2005
Funding: EU 5th Framework Program & DARPA
This international Consortium consisting of EU- and US-based partners, has developed novel technologies for building empirically induced dialogue processors to support multilingual human-computer interaction and integrate these technologies into systems for call centre applications.
The central aspect of this work has been the synthesis of dialogue systems from large corpora of human-human and human-computer dialogues. The project extended techniques that have been successful for creating robust parsers and speech recognisers to the area of dialogue systems by utilising probabilistic models and learning technologies. Our claim is that such methodologies have matured to the point that they can be applied to the efficient and reliable creation of robust dialogue systems. Once such technologies are operative at the dialogue level, they will be applicable to multiple languages, to varieties of applications, and to different user groups.
WorkTrain
Homepage: http://www.worktrain.gov.uk
Funding: Department of Work and Pensions & Xansa
Essentially a consultancy with DWP to bring natural language technology to the worktrain website. Using a language-based search box, we are trying to empower users of the site who are looking for work and training oppurtunities, by giving them new, natural methods to interact with the data sources.
NAMIC
News Agencies Multilingual Information Categorisation
Homepage: http://www.hltcentral.org/projects/NAMIC
Dates: 2000 - 2003
Funding: EU 5th Framework Program
NAMIC exploits state-of-art human language technologies for content-driven news classification and user-driven enrichment, based on the intelligent extraction of information relevant to the user. The project's goal is to harness advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for multilingual news customisation and broadcasting and to develop tools to near-market products.
YPA
Yellow Pages Assistant
Homepage: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/Research/yellowpages.htm
Dates: 1998 - 2000
Funding: British Telecommunications Research Lab
The YPA is a natural language question answering system with dialogue component, aimed at giving users precise answers to queries about Yellow Pages advertisers.
SNAP
Simple Natural Language Access Platform
Homepage: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/SNAP/Welcome.html
Dates: 1996 - 1998
Funding: BICC
Part of the SALT initiative, we were working with an industrial partner, BICC to create a natural language front end to query both a relational database (Oracle), and a text base (OpenText Livelink Intranet).