Adapting and Extending Lexical Resources in a Dialogue System

$EVWUDFW This paper presents the adaptation and customization of two lexical resources: Brill tagger, Brill (1992), and EuroWordNet, Vossen et al. (1998), to be used in the ADVICE project devoted to build an intelligent virtual reality sales and service system that uses human language technology. The work described in this paper is comprised in the ADVICE 1 project, which consists of the development of a new interface for a craftsmanship tools e-commerce system. With the aim of providing full support to customers of online shops and to the users of electronic services on the Internet during the complete customer service lifecycle; the ADVICE system will provide: An advanced multimedia user interface supporting natural language text input and output, as well as an animated assistant, that ensures a high level of user-system interaction. A software environment for building intelligent sales assistants for two types of selling and marketing services: sales-service and after sales service. The virtual assistant supported by this application will be capable of interacting with the user in natural language, adapt its recommendations to the requirements and characteristics of the customers and provide explanations of the advised products as well as of the different interesting alternatives. The dialogue is focussed on accomplishing a specific task, ordering products in an e-commerce system as well as getting advice about those products. The complexity of this domain lies in the broad product range with specialization of the crafts for particular tasks and applications. One of the main aspects of the buying-selling interaction in the web is the capability of the web site of generating some kind of trust feeling in the buyer, just like a human shop assistant would do in a person-to-person interaction. Things like understanding the buyer needs, being able to give him technical advice, assisting him in the final decision are not easy things to achieve in a web selling site. Natural language (NL) techniques can play a crucial role in providing this kind of enhancements. Another good motivation to integrate natural language technology in this kind of sites is to make the interaction easy to those people less confident with the Internet or even computer technologies. Inexperienced users feel much more comfortable expressing themselves and receiving information in natural language rather than through the human standard ways. An ADVICE project objective is to build a generic language processing component following a language engineering approach, that is, to achieve …