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TR@NSCULTUR@TR@NSCULTUR@ Towards a better transcultural Towards a better transcultural

understanding through distance education.understanding through distance education.

Gérard CHOLLET, Pascal VAILLANTGérard CHOLLET, Pascal VAILLANT(chollet,vaillant)@tsi.enst.fr(chollet,vaillant)@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

An analysis of the transcultural situationAn analysis of the transcultural situation

• Many different cultures around the world,• Some misunderstandings,• The impact of globalisation on cultural

identity,• The potential loss of cultural identity,• A large number of different languages around

the world,• The death of many languages,• The hegemony of English as a universal

language,• The Universal Networking Language initiative.

Objectives of Tr@nscultur@Objectives of Tr@nscultur@

• Improve reciprocal knowledge across cultures,• Organize a network-based experimental

laboratory of transcultural behavior and mutual understanding,

• Provide an observatory of transcultural affairs,• Set up an internet portal for transcultural

distance education,• Semantic encoding of audio- and video-

documents to facilitate multilingual access to information content

History of Tr@nscultur@History of Tr@nscultur@

Distance Education: what could technology Distance Education: what could technology offer ?offer ?

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

The ARISTOTLE project:The 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. using 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 many 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, Swahili

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