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
Summary:    Advanced Cognitive Tools for Learning University of Pittsburgh
 
Linguistics & Natural Language
Summary:    Computational Linguistics, Groupware Freiburg University
Summary: Linguistic Context in Image Understanding University of Buffalo
Summary: Natural Language Generation Technical University, Berlin
 

Ontologies

Summary: Medical Ontologies Italian National Research Council
 

Tools

Summary: Editor for Knowledge Bases SRI International


Education

Advanced Cognitive Tools for Learning, University of Pittsburgh

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.     [2/98]


Linguistics & Natural Language

Computational Linguistics, Freiburg University

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.     [8/96]

Image Understanding, University of Buffalo

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]

Natural Language Generation, Technical University, Berlin

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.     [10/97]


Ontologies

Medical Ontologies, Italian National Research Council, Medical Informatics Unit

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.     [10/97]


Tools

Editor for Knowledge Bases, SRI International

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.     [10/97]


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