CODA: COherent Dialogue Automatically generated from text

CODA(从文本自动生成的连贯对话)项目将为实现英国政府科学和技术委员会的愿景做出贡献，该愿景是“在人们需要的时候、地点和方式向他们提供服务和信息[...]”互动将通过下一代个人数字助理[...]毫无疑问，还有其他各种尚未预见的以人为本的方法。Coda将通过开发从独白形式的文本自动创建对话内容的理论和技术来帮助实现这一点。有充分的经验证据表明，在某些情况下(例如，辅导和说服性交流)，以对话的形式呈现信息可能比独白更有效。然而，由于大多数信息都被锁定在文本中(书籍、传单、网页等)，文本到对话生成技术可以在以最符合人们对易于处理和吸引人的信息的需求的形式提供信息方面发挥重要作用。对话的有效性因其非常适合于新的多媒体呈现方式的事实而被放大--例如，对话可以由数字计算机动画角色来执行。因此，以对话的形式呈现信息不仅可以提供有效的信息呈现，而且还可以娱乐和吸引人们，如新闻简报、商业广告、教育娱乐和游戏等传统媒体中广泛使用的对话就是明证。这项拟议的研究建立在与国家信息学研究所(东京)的Prendinger博士合作进行的初步可行性研究的基础上。这项研究导致了第一个原型，它采用了一份患者信息传单，上面写着：如果你头痛，可以使用阿司匹林。尽管阿司匹林确实有副作用：它会损害血液循环。，并自动生成虚拟药剂师和客户之间的对话：C：如果我头痛怎么办？病人：你可以用阿司匹林。C：但是它有副作用吗？病人：是的，它会损害血液循环。。Prendinger博士被提议作为当前项目的访问研究员。该项目将把上述第一个原型开发成一个独立于领域的系统，用于从文本生成对话，以便保留输入文本的含义，并产生连贯和连贯的对话。据我们所知，它还将产生第一个广泛的文本跨度集合，并与意义相同的对话片段配对(一个平行的文本对话语料库)。该语料库将用于该项目，以学习从文本到对话的转换，然后系统将执行这些转换。在项目的后半部分，将对该系统进行彻底评价，以确定所生成对话的内容和组织的质量。它将被应用于来自不同领域的输入文本，以测试其健壮性/领域无关性。我们预计，如果成功，这个项目将导致潜在的商业可开发的中间件，用于通过最先进的多媒体演示工具，弥合锁定在文本中的内容与有效和引人入胜的信息演示之间的差距，以及在教育(演示教科书材料)、电子健康(以引人入胜的方式演示医疗信息)和严肃/教育游戏(自动生成非玩家角色的对话内容)中的应用。

The CODA (COherent Dialogue Automatically generated from text) project will make a contribution to realizing the UK Government's Council for Science and Technology's vision of `providing people with services and information when, where and how they need it [...] Interaction will be through next generation personal digital assistants [...] and doubtlessly a variety of other human-oriented methods as yet unforeseen'. CODA will help achieve this by developing the theory and technology for automatically creating dialogue content from text in monologue form. There is ample empirical evidence that presentation of information in the form of a dialogue can be more effective than monologue in certain settings (e.g., tutoring and persuasive communication). Since most information is, however, locked up in text (books, leaflets, webpages, etc.), text-to-dialogue generation technology can play an important role in making information available in a form that best meets people's needs for easily processible and engaging information. The effectiveness of dialogue is magnified by the fact that it is eminently suitable for new multimedia presentation styles - e.g., a dialogue can be performed by digital computer-animated characters. Thus, presentation of information in dialogue form promises to not only deliver effective information presentation, but also entertain and engage people, as evidenced by the widespread use of dialogue in conventional media, such as news bulletins, commercials, educational entertainment and games. The proposed research builds on a preliminary feasibility study that was undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Prendinger at the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo). That research led to a first prototype that takes a patient information leaflet with text such as: You can use aspirin, if you have a headache. Though aspirin does have side effects: it can harm the circulation. , and automatically generates a dialogue between a virtual pharmacist and client: C: What if I have a headache? P: You can use aspirin. C: But does it have side effects? P: Yes, it can harm the circulation. . Dr. Prendinger is proposed as Visiting Researcher for the current project.The project will develop the aforementioned first prototype into a domain-independent system for the generation of dialogue from text such that the meaning of the input text is preserved and the resulting dialogue is both coherent and cohesive. It will also produce the, to our knowledge, first extensive collection of text spans paired with snippets of dialogue that are equivalent in meaning (a parallel text-dialogue corpus). This corpus will be used in the project to learn transformations from text to dialogue that the system will then implement. During the second half of the project, a thorough evaluation of the system will take place to determine the quality of the content and organization of the generated dialogues. It will be applied to input texts from a variety domains to put its robustness/domain-independence to the test. We anticipate that if successful, this project will lead to potentially commercially exploitable middle-ware for bridging the gap between content locked up in text and effective and engaging presentations of information through state-of-the-art multimedia presentation tools, with applications in education (presentation of textbook materials), E-health (presenting medical information in an engaging way), and serious/educational games (automatic generation of dialogue content for non-player characters).