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Elhuyar Fundazioa - Language Services

R&D

Strategic Research

Anhitz project

Project details

This is a strategic project designed to promote research and development in linguistic technologies in Basque. It has five partners, including the Elhuyar Foundation. The project duration is 30 months. Its partners are:

The research centre VICOMtech.
The research centre Robotiker.
The IXA and Aholab groups (both from UPV).
Elhuyar Foundation

The Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism of the Basque Government has declared the project of strategic importance and has given aid through the program Etortek.

Main objectives

Multilingualism becomes an increasing importance in the knowledge society and information. The linguistic technologies, in turn, are key to developing the tools that are needed in this area. However, these tools have been designed to function-especially in English, while other small-language communities, in particular, must make an effort. This is the case of Basque.

The goal is: that the communication between people and machines are made, as well as natural language, so intuitive and enjoyable. Achieving this goal presents a major scientific and technological challenge, since it requires integrating all aspects of language, voice, text and images.

To meet this challenge arose AnHitz the project, with the following objective: to promote research and technology development in Basque language, for interaction between people and machines, as well as knowledge management, to be natural, intuitive and pleasant.

Research lines

Textual communication: natural language understanding, language development and advanced information extraction.
Development of systems to manage knowledge: question-answer systems, information search and advanced information extraction.
Dialogue systems: development of knowledge and emotions, rules of dialogue and integration of voice in the advanced devices.
Communication with the user through images: movement of the lips, language, disabled.
Machine translation: applicable interactive modules related to knowledge management and the user.

In addition to the research, the project AnHitz has other objectives.

On the one hand, to take decisive steps for the development and consolidation of the industry in order to make possible the adaptation of research findings and devices to market needs and product marketing. Moreover, to create new technology-based companies and consolidate existing ones. Finally, creating knowledge, developing a strong research team, capable of responding independently to the challenges and objectives of R & D in this strategic line.

Project duration

30/6/2006-31/12/2008

More information:

AnHitz virtual expert on science

At the end of the project AnHitz, and as a demonstration of the potential integration of different language technologies, has mounted a virtual expert in science and technology which has been christened with the same name as the project AnHitz.

AnHitz is an expert in interactive virtual science that is expressed in Basque. Answered in that language to questions from users on science and technology, in addition, consultations may realizársele one or more words, and translated into Euskera (from the Castilian and English) documents related to that search.

AnHitz is therefore the result of the confluence of several technologies: the appearance of the avatar is a work of research-IK4 Vicomtech and its technology to create virtual characters, the group Aholab (UPV / EHU) and the Unit of Infotech is TECNALIA have to give voice to the character (AnHitz is able to pronounce words in different dialects of Basque and identify different variables), the IXA group (UPV / EHU), for its part, was ready to translate documents and to automatically euskera to answer questions, and the team of the Foundation Elhuyar finally has' trained 'to AnHitz for searching multilingual documents.

The project has brought together for the first time, various tools of that area in a single application: Question Answering, Cross Lingual Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Speech Synthesis, Automatic Speech Recognition and Visual Interfaces.

Dissemination

Scientific articles have been published and presentations made on the virtual expert on science AnHitz in several international conferences:

Arrieta K., Diaz de Ilarraza A., Hernáez, I., Iturraspe U., Leturia I., Navas, E., Sarasola K. 2008. AnHitz, development and integration of language, speech and visual technologies for Basque. V Jornadas en Tecnologías del Habla. Bilbao (Spain)
Arrieta K., Leturia I., Iturraspe U., Diaz de Ilarraza A., Sarasola K., Hernáez, I., Navas, E. 2008. AnHitz, development and integration of language, speech and visual technologies for Basque. Second International Symposium on Universal Communication. Osaka (Japan)
Leturia I., del Pozo A., Arrieta K., Iturraspe U., Sarasola K., Diaz de Ilarraza A., Navas E., Odriozola I. 2009. Development and Evaluation of AnHitz, a Prototype of a Basque-Speaking Virtual 3D Expert on Science and Technology. Computational Linguistics - Applications workshop. Mrągowo (Poland)

In the Computational Linguistics - Applications international workshop held in the Polish town of Mrągowo in October 2009, AnHitz won the award for best application of the information retrieval session and best application of the entire workshop. More information in the workshop's website and in BasqueResearch.

Moreover, a press presentation was made of the virtual expert on science AnHitz, which had a great media impact: