Natural Language Processing

这项建议探索了在人们用母语说话或写作或在用另一种语言学习这些技能的过程中提供支持的方法。这项我们称之为交互式自然语言生成的研究考虑了目标用户的特殊性，即已经掌握第一语言的成年人，而不是学习说话的儿童。它还解决了界面或导航等问题。由于语言的一个重要目标是知识转移，因此我们研究知识是如何结构、表示、获取和转化的。语言生成理论和实践已经被两本里程碑式的书所描述：一本来自描述心理过程的心理学家Levelt，另一本来自两位计算语言学家(Reiter和Dale)，展示了如何为全自动文本生成构建工具。在这个提案中，我们关注的是在机器的帮助下产生语言。因此，它是一种混合方法，它借鉴了心理语言学和语言工程学中积累的知识，另外还依赖于人类的知识、智力和技能。这项研究计划包括2名博士、4名硕士和1名博士后研究员，将参考现有的理论工作提出解决方案，并将开发基于Web的实用应用程序。每个任务都是独立的，但探索了我们整体框架的一个特定方面，以便允许学生之间的模拟和合作。这部作品的独创性在于它不同于现有的作品，来自不同的领域：自然语言生成和自然语言处理。它展示了当前的技术如何被用来帮助人类产生语言，或在外语中获得这项技能。我们将专注于构建工具，并展示人们在计算机帮助下生成语言需要考虑的因素。为了在这项研究计划中取得成功，我们将在相关项目中依靠我们在自然语言生成方面的经验，以及我们在目前的NSERC发现基金内开发的初步探索和原型。

This proposal explores ways to support people when they are speaking or writing in their mother tongue or during the process of acquiring these skills in an another language. This research, that we call Interactive Natural Language Generation, takes into account the specificities of the intended user, an adult already having a command of a first language, not a child learning to speak. It also addresses problems such as interface or navigation. Since an important goal of language is knowledge transfer, we deal with how knowledge is structured, represented, accessed and transformed. Language generation theory and practice have been described by two landmark books: one from Levelt, a psychologist describing mental processes, and another one from two computational linguists (Reiter and Dale) showing how to build tools for fully automated text generation. In this proposal, we focus on the production of language with the help of a machine. It is therefore a hybrid approach drawing on knowledge accumulated in psycholinguistics and linguistic engineering, relying additionally on human knowledge, intelligence and skills. This research program, which involves 2 PhDs, 4 MScs and a postdoctoral fellow, will propose solutions by referring to existing theoretical work and will develop practical web-based applications. Each task is independent but explores a specific facet of our overall framework so as to allow emulation and cooperation between students. The originality of this work lies in its difference from the existing body of work, drawn from different fields: natural language generation and natural language processing. It shows how current technology can be used to assist humans in producing language, or in acquiring this skill in a foreign language. We will focus on building tools and on showing what needs to be taken into account for people to generate language with the help of computers. In order to succeed in this research program, we will rely on our experience with natural language generation in related projects as well as on the preliminary explorations and prototypes we have developed within our current NSERC discovery grant.