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THE INNOVATIVE GOALS OF THE PROJECT:
  1. to develop a generic and implementable model of natural language interaction
  2. to test and compare various soft computing methods for interaction modelling and for development of a working system
  3. to develop a working system which can be intergrated into various applications that require natural language interaction

One of the important aspects of the project is to strengthen Finnish technology in natural language processing, building upon such internationally acclaimed techniques as Kimmo Koskenniemi's two-level model for morphological analysis and Teuvo Kohonen's self-organising maps for clustering data into meaning information classes.

The rapid development in IT has caused computer interaction become more common, so the need for flexible interaction is apparent not only in everyday computer use but also when the user may not be familiar with the situation. The system should thus be able to adapt to various situations and various users, so as to provide most efficient and helpful mode of interaction. This also implies that the special needs of disabled people will be taken into account when designing more natural interactive systems for access to information.

The explosion of available information also requires that the systems should be able to deal with the problem of knowledge acquisition, and in this respect systems that can learn are of great interest. The capacity of computers has also increased, enabling rapid testing and comparision of various machine learning techniques. The project uses various soft-computing and learning techniques to automate and build a learning system that will also learn from its interaction with the user.

The achievements of the project were presented in a final demo event on 12/12/2002.

Contact Dr. Kristiina Jokinen, kjokinen@uiah.fi for more information.

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Updated: 17.12.2002

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