We consider the problem of organizing and browsing the top ranked portion of the documents returned by an information retrieval system. We study the effectiveness of a document organization in helping a user to locate the relevant material among the retrieved documents as quickly as possible. In this context we examine a set of clustering algorithms and experimentally show that a clustering of the retrieved documents can be significantly more effective than traditional ranked list approach. We also show that the clustering approach can be as effective as the interactive relevance feedback based on query expansion while retaining an important advantage -it provides the user with a valuable sense of control over the feedback process.
Abstract.To increase the interest and engagement of middle school students in science and technology, the InterFaces project has created virtual museum guides that are in use at the Museum of Science, Boston. The characters use natural language interaction and have near photoreal appearance to increase and presents reports from museum staff on visitor reaction.
In this paper, we describe methods for building and evaluation of limited domain question-answering characters. Several classification techniques are tested, including text classification using support vector machines, language-model based retrieval, and cross-language information retrieval techniques, with the latter having the highest success rate. We also evaluated the effect of speech recognition errors on performance with users, finding that retrieval is robust until recognition reaches over 50% WER.
NPCEditor is a system for building a natural language processing component for virtual humans capable of engaging a user in spoken dialog on a limited domain. It uses statistical language classification technology for mapping from a user’s text input to system responses. NPCEditor provides a user-friendly editor for creating effective virtual humans quickly. It has been deployed as a part of various virtual human systems in several applications.
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