Development Of Language Technologies Research Articles

Wittgenstein and post‐analytic philosophy of education: Rorty or Lyotard?

I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy…’ Context: The ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy (Heidegger's later works, the penetration of Anglo-American philosophies into European thought, the development of language technologies); and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses (the metaphysical doctrines of modern times: narratives of progress, of socialism, of abundance, of knowledge). The weariness with regard to ‘theory’, and the miserable slackening that goes along with it (new this, new that, post-this, post-that, etc.). The time has come to philosophize. …there is no danger of philosophy's ‘coming to an end’. Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism. Even if the period from Plato to Nietzsche is encapsulated and ‘distanced’ in the way Heidegger suggests, and even if twentieth-century philosophy comes to seem a stage of awkward transitional backing and filling (as sixteenth-century philosophy now seems to us), there will be something called ‘philosophy’ on the other side of the transition.

PEGASUS: A spoken dialogue interface for on-line air travel planning

This paper describes PEGASUS, a spoken dialogue interface for on-line air travel planning that we have recently developed. PEGASUS leverages off our spoken language technology development in the ATIS domain, and enables users to book flights using the American Airlines EAASY SABRE system. The input query is transformed by the speech understanding system to a frame representation that captures its meaning. The tasks of the System Manager include transforming the semantic representation into an EAASY SABRE command, transmitting it to the application backend, formatting and interpreting the resulting information, and managing the dialogue. Preliminary evaluation results suggest that users can learn to make productive use of PEGASUS for travel planning, although much work remains to be done.