The Ypa project is building a system to make the information in classified directories more accessible. BT's Yellow Pages 1 provides an example of a classified database with which this work would be useful. There are two reasons for doing this: (i) directories like Yellow Pages contain much useful but hard-toaccess information, especially in the free text in semi-display advertisements; (ii) more generally, the project is a demonstrator for exploitation of semi-structured data -- data that is less systematic than database entries or logical clauses, but more systematic than free text because it has been marked up, for display or some other purpose. Accessing the directory source data file requires both natural language processing (for softening the interface to the system, and separately for analysis of natural-language-like constructs in the data) and information retrieval techniques, which are assisted by shallow knowledge. Deep world knowledge is impractical. The project...

The YPA is a directory enquiry system which allows a user to access advertiser information in classified directories. It converts semi-structured data in the Yellow Pages machine readable classified directories into a set of indices appropriate to the domain and task, and converts natural language queries into filled slot and filler structures appropriate for queries in the domain. The generation of answers requires a domain dependent query construction step, connecting the indices and the slot and fillers. The YPA illustrates an unusual but useful intermediate point between information retrieval and logical knowledge representation.

We present work in progress on abstracting dialog managers from their domain in order to implement a dialog manager development tool which takes (among other data) a domain description as input and delivers a new dialog manager for the described domain as output. Thereby we will focus on two topics; firstly, the construction of domain descriptions with description logics and secondly, the interpretation of utterances in a given domain. 1 Introduction Current research on dialog management is guided by two different ideas: firstly, to describe the discourse structure that the dialog manager is able to handle by a finite automaton using possible utterances as transitions (e.g. [10]), and secondly, to view the detection of discourse structure as a parameter estimation problem and to use statistical models for the description of discourse structure (e.g. [12], [8]). Some serious problems remain with each of these approaches: first of all, they do not integrate a user model. The finite sta...

The Ypa project (De Roeck et al., 1998) is building a system to make the information in classified directories more accessible. BT's Yellow Pages 1 provides an example of a classified database with which this work would be useful. Accessibility in this context means allowing users (or call center operators) to query the Yellow Pages system using Natural Language queries. For this to be possible there must be some method in the Ypa for converting theses queries into some form which allows the database to be queried. The chosen form for this project is a slot and filler construction, and this paper describes the process of slot-filling employed by the Natural Language Frontend of the Ypa. 1 Introduction The Ypa is a language engineering project for building an intelligent directory enquiry assistant where various techniques and resources are combined in a realistic application. To explain this, a brief overview and context of the Ypa is given in section 2. In section 3 this pa...

This paper presents results on a user interface model for providing universal access to mobile computing devices.