IRFP: Metalanguage Identification for Interactive Language Technologies

国际研究奖学金项目使美国科学家和工程师能够在国外进行9至24个月的研究。该计划的奖励为联合研究提供了机会，并使用独特或互补的设施、专业知识和国外的实验条件。该奖项将支持Shomir Wilson博士与苏格兰爱丁堡大学的Jon Oberlander教授和宾夕法尼亚州匹兹堡卡内基梅隆大学的Alan Black教授进行为期20个月的研究。元语言是一种重要的语言机制，它使我们能够交流关于语言本身的信息。它在许多语言活动中都是必不可少的，包括赋予语句属性、解释意思、指定名称、澄清假设和纠正误解。理解元语言的能力是人类在对话中经常使用的一种技能，无论语境或话题如何。然而，尽管元语言在语言交际中处于中心地位，但在交互式语言技术的发展中却很少受到关注，这使得这些技术无法处理或利用人机对话中出现的现象。本研究首次尝试使用计算方法来识别非正式英语语境中元语言的出现。本项目分为三个阶段。首先是创建非正式语境中元语言实例的语料库，特别是口语对话和非正式博客文本。第二部分是利用现象特有的元语言特征对现象进行检测和描述。最后，第三阶段是在为公众使用的口语对话系统的背景下对元语言检测和处理进行实际评估。该项目将填补人工智能和计算语言学领域长期存在的重大研究空白。语音对话系统的实际应用——如语音菜单、汽车GPS语音接口和盲人无障碍软件——正在迅速扩展，因为语音识别、自然语言处理和其他支持与计算机对话交互的技术得到了改进。研究元语言将弥补这些对话系统设计中缺失的元素，使它们进一步符合用户的期望，从而使它们更自然地使用。此外，这项研究将导致首席研究员与爱丁堡大学语言、认知和计算研究所（ILCC）和卡内基梅隆大学语言技术研究所（LTI）这两个东道主研究小组之间的新的国际合作。

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise, and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-month research fellowship by Dr. Shomir Wilson to work with Prof. Jon Oberlander at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Prof. Alan Black at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Metalanguage is a crucial linguistic mechanism which allows us to communicate information about language itself. It is essential for many language activities, including attributing statements, explaining meaning, assigning names, clarifying assumptions, and correcting misunderstandings. The ability to understand metalanguage is a skill that humans employ frequently in conversation and assume in fellow interlocutors, regardless of context or topic. However, in spite of its centrality to linguistic communication, metalanguage has received little attention in the development of interactive language technologies, leaving such technologies unable to cope with or exploit occurrences of the phenomenon in human-computer dialog. This research is the first effort to study the use of computational methods to identify occurrences of metalanguage in informal English contexts. This project consists of three stages. The first is the creation of corpora of instances of metalanguage in informal contexts, particularly from spoken conversations and informal blog texts. The second is the detection and delineation of the phenomenon, using features of metalanguage that are peculiar to the phenomenon. Finally, the third stage is the practical evaluation of metalanguage detection and processing within the context of a spoken dialog system deployed for use by the general public. The project will fill a long-standing and consequential research gap in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. The practical applications of spoken dialog systems - such as voice menus, car GPS voice interfaces, and accessibility software for the blind - are expanding rapidly, as improvements are made to speech recognition, natural language processing, and other technologies that support conversational interaction with computers. Studying metalanguage will remedy a missing element in the design these of dialog systems, bringing them further in-line with users' expectations and thus making them more natural to use. Moreover, this research will lead to new international collaborations between the principal investigator and the two hosts' research groups, the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation (ILCC) at the University of Edinburgh and the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University.