A Common Ground for Virtual Humans: Using an Ontology in a Natural Language Oriented Virtual Human Architecture

Arno Hartholt, Thomas Russ, David Traum, Eduard Hovy, Susan Robinson

Abstract
When dealing with large, distributed systems that use state-of-the-art components, individual components are usually developed in parallel. As development continues, the decoupling invariably leads to a mismatch between how these components internally represent concepts and how they communicate these representations to other components: representations can get out of synch, contain localized errors, or become manageable only by a small group of experts for each module. In this paper, we describe the use of an ontology as part of a complex distributed virtual human architecture in order to enable better communication between modules while improving the overall flexibility needed to change or extend the system. We focus on the natural language understanding capabilities of this architecture and the relationship between language and concepts within the entire system in general and the ontology in particular.
Anthology ID:
L08-1181
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/811_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arno Hartholt, Thomas Russ, David Traum, Eduard Hovy, and Susan Robinson. 2008. A Common Ground for Virtual Humans: Using an Ontology in a Natural Language Oriented Virtual Human Architecture. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Common Ground for Virtual Humans: Using an Ontology in a Natural Language Oriented Virtual Human Architecture (Hartholt et al., LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/811_paper.pdf
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