Non-ISI Research Projects Using Loom®
Loom® is being used
in research projects at many sites besides USC's Information Sciences Institute. The
following research groups have provided descriptions of their work.
A short summary
is available on this page, as well as a link is to the project's homepage.
Project Overviews
-
Education
Our team of educational researchers and computer scientists develops
software and materials designed to facilitate reflective problem solving
and learning in a variety of scientific and technical application areas.
We currently focus on problem-based collaborative learning scenarios
that help middle-school and high-school students learn how a community
of scientists works through a scientific problem. Our Belvedere software
is designed to develop inquiry skills that learners can apply in
everyday life as well as science and technology. We use Loom to
prototype coaching agents that comment on students' argument graphs.
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Linguistics & Natural Language
The Computational
Linguistics Research Group at Freiburg University (Germany) has been
established in 1990. The group is headed by Udo Hahn (faculty). The
focus of research activities is on the development of methodologies and
systems for understanding expository texts. The following topics are
treated with particular emphasis: natural language parsing and
understanding; text knowledge acquisition/machine learning from texts;
terminological knowledge representation and reasoning; information
extraction, text routing and retrieval; object-oriented programming
methodology; and (currently not under active investigation) group
problem-solving, multi-party negotiation and argumentation models for
computer-supported cooperative work.
Loom is used as the knowledge representation system backbone for the
text understanding applications. Currently, Loom knowledge
bases exist for two application areas, viz. information technology (376
concepts, 429 relations) and medicine (254 concepts, 309
relations). Several Loom extensions are under way, e.g., a calculus for
qualitative uncertain reasoning and a degree calculus for treating
comparative expressions.
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Show&Tell is a
research project (and also results in a prototype system) that aims at
exploring linguistic context in solving image understanding
problems. Specifically the system takes linguistic input through speech
interface, and extracts relevant information to drive the image
understanding modules. This system was developed in the application of
aerial image analysis, although it may be used in other areas.
[10/97]
The Marker project
at the Technische Universit�t Berlin/Germany does
research on natural language generation and focuses especially on the
role of discourse markers or cue words that signal the kind of
relationship between adjacent portions of text (such as "because",
"since", "in spite of", etc.). The input to the generator is a semantic
network represented in Loom, and part of the computation (determining
lexical options) exploits the Loom classifier.
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Ontologies
The Medical Ontology
Group works on the integration and reuse of terminological
ontologies in medicine. The current version of our ontology library -
ON9
- has been designed by means of the ONIONS methodology and it includes
thousands of medical concepts organized in domain, generic and
meta-level theories, which are taken from the philosophical, linguistic,
and AI literature. ON9 is written in Ontolingua and Loom and will be
soon available on the WWW to widen the agreement effort on ontologies
through negotiation and customization by users.
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Tools
The GKB-Editor (Generic Knowledge
Base Editor) is a tool for graphically browsing and editing
knowledge bases across multiple Frame Representation Systems (FRSs) in a
uniform manner. It offers an intuitive user interface, in which objects
and data items are represented as nodes in a graph, with the
relationships between them forming the edges. Users edit a KB through
direct pictorial manipulation, using a mouse or pen. A sophisticated
incremental browsing facility allows the user to selectively display
only that region of a KB that is currently of interest, even as that
region changes. Loom is among the supported FRSs.
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Loom is a registered trademark of the University of Southern California.
