Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

1-17

Authors: Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Alexandru Ceauşu, Radu Ion, Elena Irimia, Dan Stefanescu, Dan Tufis

We describe here several language resources (a lexicon, a paradigmatic morphology, two linguistic thesauri – the Romanian wordnet and Eurovoc – and a parallel multilingual corpus) from the perspective of their utility especially in question-answering tasks. We present the stages of the automatic finding of an answer to a question written by a user in a natural language. Wherever necessary, we show the way in which the linguistic resources contribute to various problems solving. The lexicon is a sort of spellchecker for the user’s question. The paradigmatic morphology is used for lemmatizing the question and the corpus. The Romanian wordnet is useful for query expansion, for identifying the lexical chains between words senses and for answers retrieval in a mono- and a multilingual system. The Eurovoc thesaurus is used for segmentation and lemmatization of the user’s question and of the parallel multilingual corpus from which the answer is retrieved. The architecture of the question-answering system described here is language independent; the language resources, however, are, inherently, language dependent (e.g. the lexicon, the paradigmatic morphology); exceptions make those whose organization or structure allows for a multilingual perspective (e.g. the thesauri and the corpus); in our case, they are aligned.

31-44

Authors: Costin Pribeanu

The quality of interactive systems is an important concern that brings in front the ergonomic quality of the user interface. Formative usability evaluation aims at identification and analysis of usability problems as early in the develompment process. For this purpose, a detailed description is needed as well as a classification according to different criteria: impact, context, explanation and suggestion for improvement. An acurate description which is agreed by the evaluation team and communicated to designers improves the product quality and motivates the process of fixing usability problems. In this paper we present a task-based approach to the design of a software tool to assist evaluators during the tasks of collecting, organization and retrieval of usability problems. In the case of heuristic evaluation and / or guidelines-based evaluation the software tools should satisfy two kinds of requirements: providing with appropriate heuristics / guidelines and recording of usability problems. These requirements are resulting from a task analysis and lead to develop a flexible software tool that could be used either as a stand-alone tool or integrated with an existing tool for working with guidelines.

73-88

Authors: Cristina Niculescu, Stefan Trausan-Matu

The paper presents an ontology-centered approach for designing an interactive competence management system for IT companies. This type of approach helps to shift the focus from a function-oriented, tool-centric view, towards a semantic-oriented view. In the paper are covered subjects as: ontologies definitions, generic architecture of the competence management system (CMS), structure of CMS ontology, building and working the ontology (integrity and inference of the ontology, knowledge acquisition, conceptualization phase, querying types of concepts). The advantage of using an ontology-based system is the possibility of the identification of new relations among concepts based on inferences starting from the existing knowledge. The user can choose to query instances of one type of concept, based on the relations that are displayed for him/her in a dropping menu. In addition to choosing relations modeled in the ontology, the user may also query inferred relations that are not explicitly stored in the knowledge base. Other search type is browsing the ontology. The skeleton of the ontology is seen as a tree with nodes and hyperlinks that point to other concepts or instances. Starting from base-concepts, the user can get specific information about any instance or concept. The paper also presents some use-cases, conclusions and further developments.