Generating Sentences

william chan

Hi,

I am thinking of using PROLOG to develop an engine to generate sentences for robot speech.
The sentences generated could be a

1. question that the robot asks a human
2. a reply to a human question
3. just a robot statement

Anybody got any experience doing this?

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LoopyByteloose

Well, linguistically you don't need formal sentences. Speech is not really about grammatically correct phrases. It is more about set comments and approriate responses. Often we ignore grammar and just produce short utterances.

I guess in some ways, that makes the job harder rather than simpler.

Another factor is that robots, like people, find it easier to talk than to listen. But good listening is exactly what is required in order to have a good response.

From what I have seen, we have artificial intelligence programs that can read and reply quite well; but listening and replying is a much greater challange. I suspect you need to have the robot able to negotiate with the speaker to produce clear meaning. That would mean havin it use phrases like 'I don't follow you.' 'Can you speak more slowly.' 'What is your main point?' and so on.

With over a decade of teaching English as a foreign language, I have a lot of experience with students getting the idea of communication very wrong. To have a machine do it better than them seems even harder. About the only think I am sure of it that it requires a lot of processing power and a larger source of data.

So far, we just have very focused telephone robots that narrow the context and listen for a few expected replies. It is far easier to make it work if the robot is in control of all the questions and merely anticipating set answers. But in the real world, everyone is allowed to ask questions and allowed to change the subject or explore new aspects..

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Post Edited (Kramer) : 4/3/2008 6:49:10 PM GMT