System Framework

Integrated research on interaction design and services architectures for natural language technology has been largely lacking in the literature, despite growing recognition by the research community that these areas can play a fundamental role in the success of language-enabled multimedia and multimodal systems and thus need to be investigated in conjunction with language technology development.

Research on Interaction Design will help improve the usability of ILT and DCM applications by supporting exploration of scenarios based on the integration projects, and creating a framework for iterative prototyping and evaluation of such applications. It will target issues that have received little attention in current localisation tools but are nevertheless key to the success of Next Generation Localisation technologies. These issues include human factors and usability, work analysis, modality combination and cultural diversity.

The Systems Framework area will also be responsible for ensuring that integration costs are controlled though the rigorous use of interoperability standards and the application of novel, knowledge-based integration tools. This will be implemented as the System Services Architecture, which will form a systems integration framework within which the various outcomes of Integrated Language Technologies, Digital Content Management and Localisation projects can be dynamically and flexibly integrated with user applications.

Interoperability is a key challenge in harnessing and validating the System Services, especially when integrating with existing corporate workflows, and the generation of appropriate solutions to this problem is vital to the success of the CSET. Moreover, the CSET is uniquely positioned to achieve significant breakthroughs in service integration for a range of linguistic applications, characterised by the differing requirements of the EL and PL applications. Recent research has pointed to the significant potential of combined ontologically-based and linguistically-based interoperability techniques. The System Services Architecture will use combined or fusion based approaches to deliver considerable capability for semantic matching.

The specific objectives of the Systems Framework area are to:

• create a framework for iterative prototyping and evaluation of core technologies,
• investigate extra-linguistic factors in interactive next-generation localisation systems,
• develop a workflow management system that supports the adaptive integration and operation of services and is sensitive to linguistic information flows and Interaction Design imperatives.
• develop shared knowledge models and information exchange mechanisms required to integrate the services and applications platform,
• define an architecture within which the various outcomes of core technology projects can be dynamically integrated with user applications.