Human-human Communication and Knowledge Management

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Human-human Communication and

Knowledge Management

Kazuo SumitaCorporate R&D Center

TOSHIBA Corp.

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Agenda

• Toshiba’s NLP R&D activities• Toshiba’s knowledge management

system• Shortage of the current KM system• New approaches

– “GroupScribe” for group communication management

– “MKIDS” for multi-modal knowledge sharing

• Future work

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

TOSHIBA NLP R&D activities 1/3• Machine translation

– English-Japanese MT : Dictionary tuning using large corpora

– Chinese-Japanese MT : Hybrid framework using rule- and statistics-based approaches

– English-Chinese MT : Prototyping using the framework for EJMT

– Japanese-English speech translation : Prototyping

• MT productsThe Honyaku (PKG software), MT server (Japan Infoseek, lycos, excite, @nifty, Japan Patent Office’s IPDL, …), Engine License to other companies

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

TOSHIBA NLP R&D activities 2/3

• Information retrieval and knowledge mining– Natural language based information retrieval– Question answering– Cross language information retrieval– Text mining: document clustering,

categorization, information extraction

• Knowledge mining products– KnowledgeMeister : KM software which can work

with several other systems (IBM WebSphere portal, Oracle9iAS Portal, Livelink, Fuji Xerox DocuCentre, Microsoft SharePointPortal server, Exchange, …)

– NewsWatch : Information filtering of news articles

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

TOSHIBA NLP R&D activities 3/3

• Speech processing– Speech synthesis: Provide human voice quality and

naturalness, multi-lingual(American English, British English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese), small memory and low computational power

– Robust speech recognition : High performance under noisy environments, multi-lingual

– Japanese speech dictation : Speaker independent, high recognition rate without enrolment

• Speech processing products– Middleware for car navigation systems,

mobile equipments, game software, LaLaVoice(PKG software)

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Knowledge sharing system

Features• NLP based information retrieval• Hierarchical clustering of accumulated documents• Categorizing newly input document• Various functions for knowledge sharing

KnowledgeMeisterTM

Chishiki-kyouyuuknowledge sharing

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Knowledge sharing system

QuestionerTell me how to writean equipment plan. Language/

intentionunderstanding

Informationretrieval

Officeknowledge

Personalknow-how

Intranet

Experienced person

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Semantic Roles: Example 1/2

Examples of search requests from a knowledge sharing in TOSHIBA corporate R&D center (English translations)

“When do we have to leave the dormitory?”

“Who can apply for a child-care leave?”

“Where can we have Chinese food in Kawasaki?”

Extracted semantic roles :time, person, place

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Semantic Roles: Example 2/2

Example request from customer support (English translation)

“I am a dynabook XX user. I’ve just pressed the power button without shutting it down. Now it displays an error message XXX”.

Extracted semantic roles: Background Action Symptom

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Insufficiency of the current KM systems

Treatment of knowledge exchange in human-human communication

• Knowledge and information exchanged by e-mail → GroupScribe

• Multi-modal knowledge such as video and speech → MKIDS

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Convert human-human communication to sharable

knowledge

Education Office

Sharable knowledge

Interactive e-Learning

Multi-modal knowledge

sharing

Reusable knowledge

Communication

E-mail

F2F dialogue

New communication

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

CIKLE : Community Knowledge WareCommunity-based Interactive Knowledge Leveraging Environment

• Drive communication-knowledge cycle– Extract and leverage knowledge

from/through communication– Find and recommend knowledge to

activate communication

Extract andleverageknowledge

Find andrecommendknowledge

Knowledgebase (Stock-type)

Communication (Flow-type)Comment / Post

Extract / EditMessagethread

Linkeddocument

Flow-Stock combination structure

Bind

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

The CIKLE solution delivers…

• Collaborative knowledge leveraging – Edit knowledge with a community consensus– Create knowledge with dialogue summarization

engine– Publish sharable knowledge from even closed

communities– Provide dual view: knowledge and its context

• Retrieval of relevant knowledge in a natural way– Accept natural language queries– Give priority to documents than messages

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Information extraction (GroupScribe)Enhancement of the summarization function of CIKLE

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Rule based extraction•Surface expressions in each message•Reference relations between messages

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Knowledge sharing practice in TOSHIBA corp.

CIKLE 07/2000 ～ 05/2003CIKLEgs 05/2003 ～

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Experienced person(Answerer) Questioner

Question and Answer

Knowledge DB

○○ を ×× する方法

カドのＲ =2-5処理方法…

Authoring tool

How should I do to manage the ×× when ○○ ?

The way of managing ×× is…

The way of managing ×× is …

How should I do to manage the ×× when ○○ ?

•Accumulation of the answering video image

•Refinement of the knowledge

②

①

Retrieval and reuse of the accumulated knowledge

③

Multi-modal knowledge sharing system (MKIDS)

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Multi-modal knowledge sharing

Questioner’s side

Answerer’s side

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

System configuration

Knowledge DB

Questioner sideMedia capture

Distribution QA retrieval

Answerer sideMedia capture

Semantic role analysis

Video dialogue

Native XML database

Authoring tool

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Snapshot of a dialogue

Semantic role analysis result

Speech recognition result

Ano kikitai no desuga (Ur, I have a question.)

Hai nande shou(Hello! May I help you?)

Questioner Answerer

[2]question [2]nodding

Ano hito no tamedakedo(For that person.)

Haittande nao(Something entered.)

Japanese-German Workshop on NLP in Sapporo Jul 4-5, 2003

Future work

• Application of the systems to several real works and the evaluation

• Improvement of the scalability and robustness

• Adoption of more natural language techniques such as IE of named entities for generating effective summary