Skip to main content

Metis: A Scalable Natural-Language-Based Intelligent Personal Assistant for Maritime Services

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
  • 1139 Accesses

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 920))

Abstract

We implement an intelligent personal conversational assistant, communicating in natural language and designed specifically for the maritime industry. A multi-stage message analysis is performed, first classifying the topic of the request and finally applying special parsers to extract the parameters needed to execute the task. Our system is scalable and robust, employing generic and efficient algorithms. Our contributions are manifold. First, we present a complex and multi-level natural-language-processing-based system, focused particularly on the maritime domain and incorporating expert knowledge of the field. Next, we introduce a series of algorithms that can extract deep information using the syntactic structure of the message. Lastly, we implement and evaluate our approach, testing and proving our system’s effectiveness and efficiency.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Sameera, A.A.K., Woods, D.J.: Survey on chatbot design techniques in speech conversation systems. Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl. 6(7), 72–80 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Vtyurina, A., Fourney, A.: Exploring the role of conversational cues in guided task support with virtual assistants. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Takagi, N., John, P., Noble, A., Björkroth, P., Brooks, B.: Vts-bot: using chatbots in smcp-based maritime communication. In: Proceedings of the Japanese Institute of Navigation JIN Conference, pp. 90–93 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Lasecki, W.S., Wesley, R., Nichols, J., Kulkarni, A., Allen, J.F., Bigham, J.P.: Chorus: a crowd-powered conversational assistant. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 151–162 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Feng, D., Shaw, E., Kim, J., Hovy, E.: An intelligent discussion-bot for answering student queries in threaded discussions. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 171–177 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Hallili, A.: Toward an ontology-based chatbot endowed with natural language processing and generation. In: 26th European Summer School in Logic, Language & Information (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Wilcox, B.: Chatscript, github repository (2018). https://github.com/bwilcox-1234/ChatScript

  8. Li, J., Monroe, W., Ritter, A., Jurafsky, D., Galley, M., Gao, J.: Deep reinforcement learning for dialogue generation. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1192–1202 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Augello, A., Saccone, G., Gaglio, S., Pilato, G.: Humorist bot: Bringing computational humour in a chat-bot system. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems, pp. 703–708 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Vinyals, O., Le, Q.V.: A neural conversational model. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Higashinaka, R., et al.: Towards an open-domain conversational system fully based on natural language processing. In: Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pp. 928–939 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Nigam, K., McCallum, A.K., Thrun, S., Mitchell, T.: Text classification from labeled and unlabeled documents using em. Mach. Learn. 39(2–3), pp. 103–134, May 2000

    Google Scholar 

  13. Khan, A., Baharudin, B., Lee, L.H., Khan, K., Tronoh, U.T.P.: A review of machine learning algorithms for text-documents classification. J. Adv. Inf. Technol. 1, 4–20 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Whitelaw, C., Hutchinson, B., Chung, G., Ellis, G.: Using the web for language independent spellchecking and autocorrection. In: Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 890–899 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Desai, N., Narvekar, M.: Normalization of noisy text data. Procedia Comput. Sci. 45, 127–132 (2015). International Conference on Advanced Computing Technologies and Applications (ICACTA)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Chandrasekar, R., Doran, C., Bangalore, S.: Motivations and methods for text simplification. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1041–1044 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Siddharthan, A.: Text simplification using typed dependencies: a comparision of the robustness of different generation strategies. In: Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 2–11 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Feblowitz, D., Kauchak, D.: Sentence simplification as tree transduction. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations, pp. 1–10 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Bingel, J., Søgaard, A.: Text simplification as tree labeling. In: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 337–343 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Quinn, K., Zaiane, O.: Identifying questions & requests in conversation. In: Proceedings of the 2014 International C* Conference on Computer Science & Software Engineering - C3S2E, vol. 14 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Li, B., Si, X., Lyu, M.R., King, I., Chang, E.Y.: Question identification on twitter. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 2477–2480 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Kwong, H., Yorke-Smith, N.: Detection of imperative and declarative question-answer pairs in email conversations. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1519–1524 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Zhao, Z., Mei, Q.: Questions about questions: an empirical analysis of information needs on twitter. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1545–1556 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Chambers, N., Jurafsky, D.: Template-based information extraction without the templates. In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies 1

    Google Scholar 

  25. Mooney, R.J., Bunescu, R.: Mining knowledge from text using information extraction. SIGKDD Explor. Newslett. 7(1), 3–10 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Microsoft: Bot framework emulator, github repository (2018). https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator

  27. Wilbur, W.J., Kim, W., Xie, N.: Spelling correction in the pubmed search engine. Inf. Retrieval 9(5), 543–564 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Wang, P., Berry, M.W., Yang, Y.: Mining longitudinal web queries: trends and patterns. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 54(8), 743–758 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Rojo-Laurilla, M.A.: English for maritime purposes: communication apprehension and communicative competence among maritime students in the philippines. Reflections Eng. Lang. Teach. 6(2), 39–58 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Apostol-Mates, R., Barbu, A.: Human error-the main factor in marine accidents. Sci. Bull. Naval Acad. 19(2), 451–454 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Jones, K.S.: A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval. J. Documentation 60(5), 493–502 (1972)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Cetintas, S., Si, L., Xin, Y.P., Zhang, D., Young Park, J.: Automatic text categorization of mathematical word problems. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International FLAIRS Conference, pp. 27–32 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Pedregosa, F., et al.: Scikit-learn: machine learning in Python. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 12, 2825–2830 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Marneffe, M.C.D., Manning, C.D.: Stanford Typed Dependencies Manual (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Honnibal, M., Johnson, M.: An improved non-monotonic transition system for dependency parsing. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1373–1378 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Stelmach, J.: Natty date parser (2018). http://natty.joestelmach.com/

  37. Salton, G.: Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co. Inc, Boston (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Turing, A.M.: Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind LIX(236), 433–460 (1950)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  39. Shawar, B.A., Atwell, E.: Different measurements metrics to evaluate a chatbot system. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies, pp. 89–96 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Radziwill, N.M., Benton, M.C.: Evaluating quality of chatbots and intelligent conversational agents. CoRR abs/1704.04579 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Noah, A., Smith, M.H., Hwa, R.: Question generation as a competitive undergraduate course project. In: Proceedings of the NSF Workshop on the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge (2008)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nikolaos Gkanatsios .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Gkanatsios, N., Mermikli, K., Katsikas, S. (2018). Metis: A Scalable Natural-Language-Based Intelligent Personal Assistant for Maritime Services. In: Damaševičius, R., Vasiljevienė, G. (eds) Information and Software Technologies. ICIST 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 920. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99972-2_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99972-2_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99971-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99972-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics