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Contact:

Igor Leturia

Elhuyar Fundazioa

Contact details:

i.leturia@elhuyar.com

(+34) 943 363040

2008/11/13

AnHitz, virtual expert in science

The objective of the AnHitz project is the investigation into and development of the linguistic technology in Basque required toenable person-device interaction and management of knowledge in a natural, intuitive and user-friendly form. In order to achieve robust and user-friendly communication, it is necessary to integrate language use in all its aspects: voice, text and even multimedia material.

As a result of this project, drawn up between 2006 and 2008, the consortium of participants has presented a first prototype, AnHitz. AnHitz is a virtual person that is expert in scientific topics and expresses itself in the Basque language, Euskera. It is capable of understanding questions put to it and responding to them. Thus, it is an interactive, virtual figure, expert in science and Basque speaking.

Besides responding to questions, if a concrete query of one or various words is given, AnHitz knows how to search through documents that include the query. To this end, it looks through a number of scientific and technological data based on the Internet. The search is multilingual, as it searches links in Basque, Spanish and English. It provides the references in Basque as such, those in Spanish are translated into Basque, and documents in English are provided in the original language. The end-user can choose in which language the documents are read..

The VICOMTech Association-IK4 and the Robotiker-Tecnalia technological centres, the Elhuyar Foundation and two research teams from the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) - the IXA and the Aholab teams – are taking part in this project.

Its external appearance is fruit of the work undertaken by VICOMTech-IK4, a technological centre which has the technology to create avatars or virtual persons. The Aholab group at the UPV/EHU and the Robotiker-Tecnalia technological centre has, for its part, trained it in voice recognition and synthesis; the system for responding to questions and the capacity to translate Internet documents automatically are the work of the IXA group at the UPV/EHU. Finally, the skill for searching multilingual documents is a result of the work carried out by the R+D Department of the Elhuyar Foundation.

AnHitz will be presented on the 13th of November, at the V. Seminars on Talking Technology Congress (V. Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla) in Bilbao. On the 15th of December it will be presented in Osaka (Japan), at the Second International Symposium on Universal Communication.