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Distance education :Distance education : What could technology What could technology offer ?offer ?

Gérard CHOLLETGérard CHOLLETchollet@tsi.enst.frchollet@tsi.enst.fr

ENST/CNRS-LTCIENST/CNRS-LTCI46 rue Barrault46 rue Barrault

75634 PARIS cedex 1375634 PARIS cedex 13http://www.tsi.enst.fr/~chollethttp://www.tsi.enst.fr/~chollet

Information Technologies for Distance Information Technologies for Distance EducationEducation

• Development of multimedia computer terminals with advanced I/O devices (audio and video),

• High (or not so high) bandwidth networks including VoIP, multicasting, videoconferencing, chat spaces, discussion forums, email, …

• Storage media (CDROM, DVD, …)• Compression of audio- and video-documents• Semantic encoding of such documents• Multilingual access to information content• Natural Language and Speech Understanding

The ARISTOTLE projectThe ARISTOTLE project

• Make accessible to 2000 students, through a University Intranet and through high bandwidth Internet (2Mbps), a first year university course on Biology.

• Provide anytime, anywhere access to the course material, including lectures, indexing, search engine, chat space, forum, email,…

• Develop Natural Language and Speech Processing tools to improve interaction between students, teachers and the knowledge web.

Components of The Online-Classroom of Aristotle

Internet Browser

RealPlayerG2 plug-in

BitcastingMPEGplug-in

Media Server Administrator

Streaming Media Server

CONTENT DIRECTORIES• MPEG, JPEG files• HTML files• SMIL, RealText Files

Web Server Administrator

WebServer

Aristotle on-line lectureAristotle on-line lecture

Knowledge Web RepresentationKnowledge Web Representation

CelullarOrganization

Evolution

BIOLOGY

Genetics

GeneticEngineering

DNA

DarwinianEvolution

Evolutionof primates

Legend:

LinkType1:Subtopic/Supertopic

LinkType2:Related

Knowledge Node

Challenges of future education using ITChallenges of future education using IT

• Develop new pedagogical paradigms• Personalisation and group synergy• Access to information and guidance• Communication between students,

between students and teachers, and between students and educational software

• Worldwide accessability for all languages of the world

• Improve networking technology

A perspectiveA perspective

• Language independent knowledge web• Information on this web is represented

semantically (for ex. in UNL: a pivot language)• The student can access this information in (his,

her) own language• Information is generated from the pivot

language to the target (natural) language• Tools are being developed to help teachers

create this knowledge web and validate the UNL representation and translation in various languages.

What is the Universal Networking Language (UNL)?

• An initiative from the United Nations,• A common (standard, artificial) language

for computers to express (encode) information written in natural language,

• Consists of Universal Words , Relations, Semantic attributes, Knowledge Base,

• Represent sentences as a semantic graph

A node represents a concept

An arc represents a relation

• semantic representation of sentences:

→“ How is translation performed by computers? ”

... extraction of relevant keywords to build the query:

→agt(translate(icl>do),computer(icl>machine))

UNL: Universal Networking LanguageUNL: Universal Networking Language

translate(icl>do) computers(icl>machine)agt

Languages covered so far :Languages covered so far :

• The 6 UN official languages :

Arabic, Chinese, English, French,

Spanish, Russian

• and other languages :

German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian,

Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongol,

Latvia, Portuguese, Thai

UNL architectureUNL architecture

InternetWeb PageContents

UNL-server

Language Server A

UNL <--> Chinese

Language Server B

UNL <--> French

Internet

enconverter

enconverter

deconverter

deconverter

Chinese

French

UNL Viewer

UNL Proxy

Access to Multilingual documents using Access to Multilingual documents using UNLUNL

Conclusions and PerspectivesConclusions and Perspectives

• a semantic representation of content is a benefit for:– the creation of non-ambiguous textual

material,– an efficient search through large databases,– the access to such material in many

languages of the world.

• multimedia compression will always be beneficial for:– a fast access to information,– the indexing of audio-visual documents.

Thanks for your attentionThanks for your attention