ILEX: Project Organisation

Description: ILEX seeks to automatically generate labels for items in an electronic catalogue (or museum gallery) in such a way as to reflect the interest of the user and also opportunistically to further certain educational (or other) aims. This project is in collaboration with the National Museums of Scotland, Interactive Information and VIS Interactive Media. At present, we are working on a museum domain, specifically, the 20th Century Jewellery Exhibit in the Royal Museum of Scotland.

Researchers:

Department of Artificial Intelligence:

Chris Mellish

Mick O'Donnell

Hua Cheng.

Human Communication Research Centre (HCRC):

Jon Oberlander

Alistair Knott

Richard Cox

Janet Hitzeman

Maria Milosavljevic (visiting from MRI, Sydney)

Related Projects:

SOLE is a project whose aim is to interface ILEX with a speech synthesis system, using the discourse-structural information produced in ILEX to improve the generation of prosody and contrastive emphasis.

GNOME is a project focussing on the generation of nominal expressions. A general algorithm for referring expression generation will be developed, and interfaced to two existing NLG systems; ILEX in Edinburgh, and ICONOCLAST in Brighton.

HIPS is a European project which aims to develop a portable guidebook tool to assist a tourist in navigation and information-gathering in a wide range of indoor and outdoor situations. ILEX will provide the text-generation component of this system.

TRINDI aims to produce a robust model of dialogue, which will in part be implemented; ILEX is being considered as a platform for this implementation.

There is also a short project to convert ILEX to the domain of electronic catalogues, organised at the Artificial Intlligence Applications Institute (AIAI).

ILEX now produces Spanish output as well, in a version produced by Adriana Morales-Cueto.