Enhancing a Pervasive Computing Environment with Lexical Knowledge

A pervasive computing environment consists typically of a large heterogeneous collection of networked devices. This paper describes the use of lexical knowledge to improve a pervasive computing environment. In an ongoing research project, we are exploring ways to enable non-technical users to manage and control their home environment that is particularly hostile. We assume that each device belonging to the pervasive environment has its own knowledge model, linked to lexical resources, with the purpose of defining a semantic interface. This approach tries to reach the pervasive essence of the natural language. The coverage of handmade lexical resources is limited, coverage problems remain for applications involving specific domains or involving multiple languages. Our recent efforts are directed towards the technology development, focusing on devices that are household appliances. This work is a contribution to facilitate, specially: the generation of multilingual device descriptions, the automatic build of device’s graphical user interfaces, and on the fly adaptation of a spoken dialogue system to the per-