CHI 2000 Workshop on Natural Language Interfaces

The Hague, The Netherlands, April 3, 2000

Position Paper for

CHI2000 Natural Language Interaction Workshop

QianYing Wang	Hui Su
wangqy@cn.ibm.com	suhui@cn.ibm.com

IBM China Research Lab

No.26, 6th Str, ShangDi

Beijing, P.R.China

IBM China Research Lab was founded in 1995. In the past four years, its reserach teams have achieved significant progress in areas of Chinese speech recognition, Chinese character recognition, natural language processing, internet media broadcasting, mobile device solution and e-commerce solutions. The main target of IBM -CRL is to expediate the information technology to be applied in China, to let more and more Chinese people enjoy the advantage brought by the information technology. The main challege of this target is how to minimize the predictable gap between the research technology and its application to common user’s daily tasks. A new HCI team in CRL is set up to solve this problem.

We are new in HCI and NL area and what we are thinking about now is how to make our existing technology more natural and easy to use, and how to make it fit better in Chinese cultural context. We identified that two application environment will be very important for natural language interaction area. The first is the home environment and the second is the internet search.

First comes the idea of e-home, which would be the control center for all the home intelligent appliances. When you come back to your home, your e-home will recognize you are backing to home, it salutes to you and begin to talk with you. It will ask you several questions in Chinese, for example: do you want to hear some newly downloaded mp3 songs?, or do you want to hear CNN headline news?, or do you want to hear tomorrow weather report ? You can make your decision and your e-home will work in the requested way. When the telephone rings, you make a gesture to the e-home capture system, it turn the volume of music down, when you want to make a phone call to a friend when cooking, you can tell the number to the e-home, which dial it for you, so on and so forth. We believe everybody in NL area is too familiar with these scenes, what we want to do is to realize this great idea step by step, each step brings some practical usage to people.

Another area we are interested in is the internet search. Now the current search method is you put sth into a edit box, the search engine returns with thousands of links. Can any NLU technology be applied to this search scenario? Currently we are working on new UI design for what we called natural search, trying to find some NL application in this area.