The Use of Terminology and Ontology Theory in the Development of a Language Assistant System for Backpackers

AS the living standards being elevated and the concept of demanding for better living qualities being planted in most of the people, leisure and entertainment have been considered more important in daily lives. Among the leisure activities, the independent travel is embraced the most. However, traveling abroad does not synchronize in the same growth trend as travelling domestically in Taiwan. It is believed that language capabilities hinder most travelers from travelling abroad. Although travelers may resolve the difficulties with recourse to tools, such as electronic translators and electronic dictionary, the tools that are popular and adopted by most people provide, in fact, very limited help to backpackers. This research aims at building the ontology of the knowledge base of a language assistant system by applying terminology theory. This research first analyzes the contexts that most backpackers may encounter. The terminology theory is then adopted to categorize the contexts. Furthermore, this research constructs the ontology tree for the contexts. The conversations that may occur in all contexts are generated and placed in the ontology tree according to the rules of the ontology tree structure. A language assistant system in Chinese-English is developed to demonstrate how the backpackers would benefit from the system and how they are able to locate the proper dialogue from the knowledge database for a certain circumstance or a specific context.