24 July 2006
UbiEst enters the EU QUALL-ME Project Consortium
The QALL-ME Project (Question Answering Learning technologies in a multiLingual and Multimodal Environment) is an European Commission initiative within Sixth Framework Programme, Priority 2, Information Society Technologies envolving seven institutions from four member countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Spain and Germany).
The general objective of QALL-ME is to establish a shared infrastructure for multilingual and multimodal open domain Question Answering for mobile phones. QA takes a question in natural language and returns an answer from a collection of information sources (e.g. documents, databases). In contrast to the technologies behind today's web search engines, the goal of QA is not to return a document which contains the answer, as in the case of information retrieval, but the actual sequence of words which constitutes the answer.
The QALL-ME Consortium is composed of seven institutions from four member countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Spain and Germany). Four of the participants are academic institutions (ITC-irst, University of Wolverhampton, University of Alicante, and DFKI), while the others are industrial partners (Comdata, Ubiest, and Waycom).
UbiEst will be in charge of putting its industrial experience into the realization of innovative services, in order to guarantee that the QALL-ME technology meets all the market requirements, both from a user-oriented perspective and from the business perspective.
The QALL-ME infrastructure will allow users from the four European countries involved in the project to formulate questions in their native languages (i.e. English, Italian, Spanish, and German), and to obtain fast and exhaustive answers directly on their telephone's display, thus making a vast amount of information easily accessible anywhere at any time.
The potential of open domain QA will be experimented with and evaluated in the context of mobile applications for information seeking, a multimodal scenario which includes spontaneous speech as input and the integration of textual answers with maps, images, and short videos as output.
QALL-ME will provide innovative solutions to automatically manage huge amounts of multilingual information coming from different source data types, allow users for an easy and natural means of interaction, based on natural language, through their mobile telephone or PDA, present users with rich and reliable information anywhere and at any time.
The particular experience and strengths of the partners cover all specific areas of the project including: Natural Language Processing and QA (ITC-irst, DFKI, University of Wolverhampton, University of Alicante), knowledge technologies and the Semantic Web (ITC-irst, DFKI), speech processing (ITC-irst and Waycom), Digital assistance (Comdata), mapping and geocoding (Ubiest).
The QA infrastructure will provide a more systematic view on the generic aspects of QA technology and system design, as well as its instantiations and embedding into different QA applications. Via the international consortium, the planned project is connected with major scientific and technological developments in a multitude of national and international R&D communities and research cultures and hopes to ensure that the European R&D community will be a global player from a scientific point of view also for the future knowledgeable information society.
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