IRFP: Metalanguage Identification for Interactive Language Technologies

国际研究奖学金计划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。该计划的奖项提供了联合研究的机会，以及使用国外独特或互补的设施，专业知识和实验条件。 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教授合作20个月的研究奖学金。 元语言是一种重要的语言机制，它使我们能够交流有关语言本身的信息。它对许多语言活动都是必不可少的，包括归因陈述，解释含义，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技能，并且在其他对话者中假设，无论上下文或主题如何。然而，尽管它的语言交流的中心，元语言在交互式语言技术的发展很少受到关注，离开这样的技术无法科普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的元语言。该项目包括三个阶段。第一个是在非正式语境中创建元语言实例语料库，特别是从口语对话和非正式博客文本。第二个是检测和描绘的现象，使用元语言的特点，是特有的现象。最后，第三阶段是元语言检测和处理的实际评估范围内的口语对话系统部署供公众使用。 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。随着语音识别、自然语言处理和其他支持与计算机进行对话交互的技术的改进，语音对话系统的实际应用（如语音菜单、车载GPS语音界面和盲人辅助软件）正在迅速扩大。研究元语言将弥补对话系统设计中的一个缺失元素，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和两个主持人的研究小组，爱丁堡大学的语言，认知和计算研究所（ILCC）和卡内基梅隆大学的语言技术研究所（LTI）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.