D: How many batteries do you go through ?
B: Thank you .
C: Alright .
A: Sure .
C: Good .
C: Yeah .
C: OK so , let 's get started .
C: Nancy said she 's coming
C: and that means she will be .
C: Um . My suggestion is that Robert and Johno sort of give us a report on last week 's adventures uh to start .
C: So everybody knows there were these guys f uh from Heidelber - uh , uh , actually from uh DFKI uh , part of the German SmartKom project , who were here for the week
C: and , I think got a lot done .
E: Yeah , I think so too .
E: Um .
E: The we got to the point where we can now speak into the SmartKom system , and it 'll go all the way through and then say something like " Roman numeral one , am Smarticus . "
E: It actually says , " Roemisch einz , am Smarticus , "
E: which means it 's just using a German sythesis module for English sentences .
B: OK .
B: OK .
E: So uh ,
C: It doesn't know " I " .
B: OK .
E: Um , the uh
B: Oh ,
B: Am Spartacus . "
D: " I am Sm - I am Smarticus " is what it 's saying .
B: Verstehe .
A: Right .
D: I gue
B: OK .
E: The uh sythesis is just a question of um , hopefully it 's just a question of exchanging a couple of files , once we have them .
E: And , um , it 's not going to be a problem because we decided to stick to the so - called concept to speech approach .
E: So I 'm I 'm I 'm going backwards now ,
E: so " synthesis " is where you sort of make this uh , make these sounds ,
E: and " concept to speech " is feeding into this synthesis module giving it what needs to be said , and the whole syntactic structure
E: so it can pronounce things better , presumably . Then , just with text to speech .
B: Mm - hmm .
E: And , uh , Johno learned how to write XML tags .
E: Uh , and did write the tree adjoining grammar for some some sentences .
E: No ,
E: right ?
E: Yeah , for a couple D: Yeah .
D: So . Bu - Uh , i The way the uh , the dialogue manager works is it dumps out what it wants to know , or what it wants to tell the person , to a er in XML
D: and there 's a conversion system for different uh , to go from XML to something else .
D: And th so , the knowledge base for the system , that generates the syntasti syntactic structures for the ge generation is uh , in a LISP - like the knowledge base is in a LISP - like form .
D: And then the thing that actually builds these syntactic structures is something based on Prolog .
D: So , you have a basically , a goal
D: and it , you know , says " OK , well I 'm gonna try to do the Greet - the - person goal ,
B: Mm - hmm .
D: so it just starts uh , it binds some variables and it just decides to , you know , do some subscold .
D: Basically , it just means " build the tree . "
D: And then it passes the tree onto , uh , the ge the generation module .
B: OK .
E: But I think that the point is that out of the twelve possible utterances that the German system can do , we 've already written the the syntax trees for three or four .
D: We
D: yeah .
D: So , the syntax trees are very simple .
D: It 's like most of the sentences in one tree ,
B: Mm - hmm .
D: and instead of , you know , breaking down to , like , small units and building back up , they basically took the sentences , and basically cut them in half , or you know , into thirds or something like that , and made trees out of those .
D: And so uh , uh Tilman wrote a little tool that you could take LISP notation and generate an XML , uh , tree . Uh , S what do ca structure from the from the LISP .
D: And so basically you just say , you know , " noun goes to " , you know ,
D: Er , nah , I don't re I 've never been good at those .
D: So there 's like the VP goes to N and those things in LISP , and it will generate for you .
B: OK . N ,
B: N , V
B: yeah ,
B: OK .
B: Alright .
E: And because we 're sticking to that structure , the synthesis module doesn't need to be changed . So all that f fancy stuff ,
E: and the Texas speech version of it , which is actually the simpler version , is gonna be done in October which is much too late for us .
E: So .
E: This way we we worked around that .
E: The , uh the system , um I can show you the system .
E: I actually want , at least , maybe , you should be able to start it on your own . If you wanna play around with it , in th in the future .
E: Right now it 's brittle and you need to ch start it up and then make ts twenty changes on on on on seventeen modules before they actually can stomach it , anything .
E: And send in a a a couple of side queries on some dummy center set - up program so that it actually works
E: because it 's designed for this seevit thing , where you have the gestural recognition running with this s Siemens virtual touch screen , which we don't have here .
B: Mm - hmm .
E: And so we 're doing it via mouse ,
E: but the whole system was designed to work with this thing
E: and it was It was a lot of engineering stuff .
E: No science in there whatsoever ,
E: but it 's working now ,
E: and um , that 's the good news .
E: So everything else actually did prove to be language independent except for the parsing and the generation .
D: Why I had I did need to chan generate different trees than the German ones ,
D: mainly because you know like uh , the gerund in in German is automatically taken care of with just a regular verb ,
E: You have to switch it on .
B: Mm - hmm .
D: so I 'd uh have to add " am walking , "
D: or I 'd have to add a little stem for the " am " , when I build the built the tree .
B: OK .
B: OK .
B: Yeah , I noticed that um , that some of the examples they had , had you know , non - English word orders and so on ,
B: you know . And then all that good stuff .
B: So .
D: Yeah .
C: Alright .
B: Like .
C: So it might be worth , Keith , you looking at this ,
B: Yeah .
C: um
D: Well Tilman s
B: I I still don't I still don't really understand e like B: I mean we sort of say , um B: You know , I I still don't exactly understand sort of the information flow uh in in this thing , or what the modules are and so on .
B: So , you know , like just that such - and - such module uh um decides that it wants to achieve the goal of greeting the user ,
B: and then magically it sort of s
C: Yeah B: I mean , how does it know which syntactic structure to pull out , and all that ?
C: I thi
C: Yeah .
C: So . I think it 's not worth going over in the group ,
B: R uh
C: but sort of when you get free and you have the time uh either Robert or Johno or I can walk you through it .
B: Sure .
B: Yeah ,
B: soon .
B: OK .
C: And you can ask all the questions about how this all fits together .
B: That 's fine .
C: It 's eee <comment> messy
C: but once you understand it you understand it .
C: It 's it 's There 's nothing really complicated about it .
B: OK .
E: No .
B: And I remember one thing that that came up in the talk last Wednesday . Um , was this ,
B: I I think he talked about the idea of like , um He was talking about these lexicalized uh , uh , tree adjoining grammars where you sort of for each word you , um D: OK , you know how to do it ?
B: For each lexical item , the lexical entry says what all the uh trees are that it can appear in .
B: And of course , that 's not v That 's the opposite of constructional .
B: That 's , you know , that 's that 's HPSG or whatever .
C: Right .
C: Right .
B: You know ?
C: Now , we 're we 're not committed for our research to do any of those things .
B: Yeah .
B: Mm - hmm .
C: So uh we are committed for our funding .
B: Right .
C: OK ?
C: to uh B: Make our stuff fit to that .
C: Yeah , to C: n no , to just get the dem get the demos they need .
B: Uh - huh .
C: OK ?
C: So between us all we have t to get th the demos they need .
C: If it turns out we can also give them lots more than that by , you know , tapping into other things we do , that 's great .
D: You should probably move the microphone closer to your face .
B: Mm - hmm .
C: But i it turns out not to be in an any of the contracts
D: There 's like a little The twisty thing , you can move it with .
B: OK .
C: and , s deliberately .
C: So , the reason I 'd like you to understand uh what 's going on in this demo system is not because it 's important to the research .
C: It 's just for closure .
C: So that if we come up with a question of " could we fit this deeper stuff in there ? " or something .
C: You know what the hell we we 're talking about fitting in .
B: Right .
B: OK .
C: So it 's just , uh in the sam same actually with the rest of us
C: we just need to really understand what 's there .
C: Is there anything we can make use of ?
C: Uh , is there anything we can give back , beyond th the sort of minimum requirements ?
C: But none of that has a short time fuse .
B: OK .
C: So th the demo the demo requirements for this Fall are sort of taken care of as of later this week or something .
C: And then So , it 's probably fifteen months or something until there 's another serious demo requirement .
C: That doesn't mean we don't think about it for fifteen months ,
B: Oh OK .
C: but it means we can not think about it for six months .
B: Right .
B: Right , yeah .
C: So . The plan for this summer uh , really is to step back from the applied project ,
E: Right .
C: keep the d keep the context open , but actually go after the basic issues .
B: Hmm .
B: Oh OK .
C: And ,
C: so The idea is there 's this uh , other subgroup that 's worrying about formalizing the nota getting a notation .
C: But sort of in parallel with that , uh , the hope is tha in particularly you will work on constructions in English Ge - and German for this domain ,
B: Mm - hmm .
C: but y not worry about parsing them or fitting them into SmartKom or any of the other anything lik any other constraints for the time being .
B: Yeah .
B: OK .
B: Got it .
C: It 's hard enough to get it semantically and syntactically right and then and get the constructions in their form and stuff .
B: Yeah .
C: And , I don I don't want you f feeling that you have to somehow meet all these other constraints .
B: Right , OK .
C: Um . And similarly with the parsing , uh we 're gonna worry about parsing uh , the general case
C: you know , construction parser for general constructions .
C: And , if we need a cut - down version for something , or whatever , we 'll worry about that later .
B: OK .
C: So I 'd like to , for the summer turn into science mode .
B: OK .
C: And I assume that 's also , uh , your plan as well .
C: Right .
B: So I mean , the the point is that like the meetings um so far that I 've been at have been sort of been geared towards this demo ,
C: Yeah .
C: Yeah .
C: But but we we 're swit
B: and then that 's going to go away pretty soon .
C: Right .
B: OK .
B: And then we 'll sort of shift gears a Fairly substantially ,
C: Yeah .
E: It 's C: Yeah .
E: It 's got .
B: huh ?
C: Yeah .
E: What I what I think is is a good idea that I can can show to anyone who 's interested ,
E: we can even make a sort of an internal demo ,
E: and I I show you what I do ,
B: Mm - hmm .
E: I speak into it and you hear it talk ,
B: OK .
E: and I can sort of walk f through the information .
E: So , this is like in half hour or forty - five minutes .
E: Just fun .
B: OK .
E: And so you when somebody on the streets com comes up to you and asks you what is SmartKom so you can , sort of , give a sensible answer .
B: Right .
B: OK .
C: So , c sh we could set that up as actually an institute wide thing ?
C: Just give a talk in the big room , and and so peo people know what 's going on ?
C: when you 're ready ?
E: Absolutely .
C: Yeah I mean , that 's the kind of thing C: That 's the level at which you know we can just li invite everybody and say " this is a project that we 've been working on and here 's a demo version of it " and stuff like that .
B: Yeah .
E: OK .
E: Well d we we do wanna have all the bugs out b where you have to sort of pipe in extra XML messages from left and right before you 're B: Uh - huh .
C: Indeed .
E: Yeah .
E: OK .
E: Makes sense .
C: But any so that e e
C: It 's clear , then , I think .
C: Actually , roughly starting uh let 's say , nex next meeting , cuz this meeting we have one other thing to tie up besides the trip report .
B: Yeah .
B: OK .
C: But uh starting next meeting I think we want to flip into this mode where C: Uh . I mean there are a lot of issues ,
C: what 's the ontology look like ,
B: Mm - hmm .
C: you know what do the constructions look like ,
C: what 's the execution engine look like ,
C: mmm lots of things .
B: Mm - hmm .
C: But , more focused on uh an idealized version than just getting the demo out .
C: Now before we do that , let 's get back in C: Oh !
C: But , it 's still , I think , useful for you to understand the demo version enough , so that you can can see what what it is that that uh it might eventually get retro - fitted into or something .
B: Yeah .
B: OK ,
B: right .
C: And Johno 's already done that , uh , looked at the dem uh the looked at the SmartKom stuff .
D: Wa
D: uh D: To some de
D: uh what what part of th the SmartKom stuff ?
C: Well , the parser , and that stuff .
D: Oh yeah yeah .
C: OK . Anyway .
C: So , the trip C: the report on these C: the last we we sort of interrupted you guys telling us about what happened last week .
B: Yeah .
B: It 's alright .
E: Um . Well it was just amazing to to see uh how how instable the whole thing is ,
C: Maybe you 're done , then .
E: and if you just take the E: And I g I got the feeling that we are the only ones right now who have a running system .
E: I don't know what the guys in Kaiserslautern have running
E: because
E: e the version that is , the full version that 's on the server d does not work .
E: And you need to do a lot of stuff to make it work .
E: And so it 's E: And even Tilman and Ralf sort of said " yeah there never was a really working version that uh did it without th all the shortcuts that they built in for the uh October @ @ version " .
E: So we 're actually maybe ahead of the System Gruppe by now ,
E: the system the integration group .
E: And it was , uh It was fun to some extent ,
E: but the uh the outcome that is sort of of scientific interest is that I think both Ralf and Tilman E: um , I know that they enjoyed it here ,
E: and they r they they liked , uh , a lot of the stuff they saw here ,
E: what what we have been thinking about ,
E: and they 're more than willing to to um , cooperate , by all means .
E: And um , part of my responsibility is uh to use our internal " group - ware " server at EML ,
E: make that open to all of us and them ,
E: so that whatever we discuss in terms of parsing and and generating and constructions w we we sort of uh put it in there
E: and they put what they do in there
E: and maybe we can even um , get some overlap , get some synergy out of that .
E: And um ,
E: the , uh E: If I find someone at in EML that is interested in that , um I I may even think that we could look take constructions and and generate from them
E: because the tree adjoining grammars that that Tilman is using is as you said nothing but a mathematical formalism .
E: And you can just do anything with it , whether it 's syntactic trees , H P S G - like stuff , or whether it 's construction .
E: So if you ever get to the generation side of constructing things and there might be something of interest there ,
E: but in the moment we 're of course definitely focused on the understanding , um , pipeline .
C: Anyth - any other <comment> uh repo visit reports sort of stories ?
C: uh we so we now know I think , what the landscape is like .
B: Mm - hmm .
C: And so we just push on and and uh , do what we need to do .
C: And one of the things we need to do is the um , and this I think is relatively tight tightly constrained , is to finish up this belief - net stuff .
C: So .
C: Uh . And I was going to switch to start talking about that unless there 're m other more general questions .
C: OK so here 's where we are on the belief - net stuff as far as I understand it .
C: Um . Going back I guess two weeks ago uh Robert had laid out this belief - net , missing only the connections .
C: Right ?
C: That is <comment> So , he 'd put all th all the dots down ,
C: and we went through this , and , I think , more or less convinced ourselves that at least the vast majority of the nodes that we needed for the demo level we were thinking of , were in there .
C: Yeah <comment> we may run across one or two more .
C: But of course the connections weren't .
C: So , uh Bhaskara and I went off and looked at some technical questions about were certain operations sort of legitimate belief - net computations and was there some known problem with them or had someone already uh , solved you know how to do this and stuff .
C: And so Bhaskara tracked that down .
C: The answer seems to be uh , " no , no one has done it , but yes it 's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if that 's what you set out to do " .
C: And , so the current state of things is that , again , starting now , um we 'd like to actually get a running belief - net for this particular subdomain done in the next few weeks .
C: So Bhaskara is switching projects as of the first of June ,
C: and uh , he 's gonna leave us an inheritance , which is a uh hopefully a belief - net that does these things .
C: And there 're two aspects to it , one of which is , you know , technical ,
C: getting the coding right , and making it run , and uh stuff like that .
C: And the other is the actual semantics .
C: OK ? What all you know , what are the considerations and how and what are the ways in which they relate .
C: So he doe h he doesn't need help from this group on the technical aspects or if he does uh we 'll do that separately .
B: Mm - hmm .
C: But in terms of what are the decisions and stuff like that , that 's something that we all have to work out .
C: Is is that right ?
C: I mean that 's that 's both you guys ' understanding of where we are ?
E: Absolutely .
C: OK .
G: So , I guess , um Is there like a latest version of the belief - net of the proposed belief - net ?
G: Like E: We had um decided G: like E: Um . Well , no , we didn't decide .
E: We wanted to look into maybe getting it , the visualization , a bit clearer ,
E: but I think if we do it , um , sort of a paper version of all the nodes and then the connections between them , that should suffice .
G: Mm - hmm .
G: Yeah ,
G: that should be fine .
D: Yeah , I C: Yeah I mean , that 's a separate problem .
C: We do in the long run wanna do better visualization and all that stuff .
E: Yeah .
C: That 's separable ,
C: yeah .
D: I did look into that , uh in terms of , you know , exploding the nodes out and down ag
C: Yep .
C: Right .
D: JavaBayes does not support that .
D: I can imagine a way of hacking at the code to do that .
D: It 'd probably take two weeks or so to actually go through and do it ,
C: Not not at this point .
D: and I went through all the other packages on Murph - Kevin Murphy 's page ,
C: Right .
D: and I couldn't find the necessary mix of free and uh with the GUI and , with this thing that we want .
C: Well , we can p If it 's If we can pay C: Yeah . If you know it 's paying a thousand dollars or something we can do that .
C: OK ?
D: OK .
C: So so don't view free as as a absolute constraint .
D: OK , so then I 'll go back and look at the ones on the list that C: OK .
G: Yeah .
E: But C: And you can ask Kevin .
G: Yeah , the one that uh people seem to use is uh Hugin or whatever ?
D: Mmm .
E: But C: Hugin ,
C: yeah that 's free .
G: How exp
G: I don't think it 's G: Is it free ?
G: Because I 've seen it advertised in places so I it seems to C: Uh , it may be free to academics .
C: Like I I don't know .
C: I have a co <comment> I have a copy <comment> that I l I downloaded .
G: OK .
C: So , at one point it was free .
G: OK .
C: Uh but yo I noticed people do use Hugin
C: so um ,
D: How do you spell that ?
F: Why
C: HUGIN .
C: And Bhaskara can give you a pointer .
C: So then , in any case , um C: But paying a lit
C: You know , if i if it 's uh C: Probably for university , it 's it 's gonna be real cheap anyway .
C: But um , you know , if it 's fifty thousand dollars we aren't gonna do it .
C: I 'm mean , we have no need for that .
E: I I also s would suggest not to d spend two weeks in in in changing the the JavaBayes code .
C: No ,
C: he 's not gonna do that .
B: Yeah .
D: OK .
E: I I will send you a pointer to a Java applet that does that ,
E: it 's sort of a fish - eye .