Introducing Computational Semantics for Natural Language Understanding in Conversational Nutrition Coaches for Healthy Eating

Proceedings

Callejas, Zoraida¹  Benítez-Guijarro, Antonio²  Noguera, Manuel³ 

[1] Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.;Department of Languages and Computer Systems, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain;Presented at the 12th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2018), Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, 4–7 December 2018

关键词: natural language processing;    nutrition;    E-health;    voice assistant;    semantic processing;    multimodal interaction;   

DOI  :  10.3390/proceedings2190506

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Nutrition e-coaches have demonstrated to be a successful tool to foster healthy eating habits, most of these systems are based on graphical user interfaces where users select the meals they have ingested from predefined lists and receive feedback on their diet. On one side the use of conversational interfaces based on natural language processing allows users to interact with the coach more easily and with fewer restrictions. However, on the other side natural language introduces more ambiguity, as instead of selecting the input from a predefined finite list of meals, the user can describe the ingests in many different ways that must be translated by the system into a tractable semantic representation from which to derive the nutritional aspects of interest. In this paper, we present a method that improves state-of-the-art approaches by means of the inclusion of nutritional semantic aspects at different stages during the natural language understanding processing of the user written or spoken input. The outcome generated is a rich nutritional interpretation of each user ingest that is independent of the modality used to interact with the coach.

【 授权许可】

CC BY