Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

Information Extraction from the World Wide Web Using a
Speech Interface
Hansjörg Hofmann, Ute Ehrlich
Daimler AG
Ulm, Germany
{hansjoerg.hofmann,ute.ehrlich}@daimler.com
ABSTRACT
Due to the mobile internet revolution, people tend to browse
the World Wide Web while driving their car which puts
the driver’s safety at risk. Therefore, a speech interface to
the Web integrated in the car’s head unit needs to be developed.
In this paper, we present a speech dialog system
which enables the user to extract topic related information
from web sites with unknown page structures. One challenge
is to extract and understand the requested information from
the web site which is achieved by parsing the HTML code
against a predefined semantic net where special topics (e.g.
“weather”) are modelled. The extracted information is the
basis for the generic speech dialog which is designed in an
intuitive and driver-convenient way in order to not distract
the user.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User
Interfaces
1. MOTIVATION
The arrival of smartphones has shaped new expectations
towards mobile devices: Using mobile internet the user is
able to get instant access to content-relevant information,
infotainment systems, and services, anytime and anywhere.
The success of smartphones also significantly impacts automotive
systems. However, since for safety reasons smartphones
and similar existing technologies cannot be used while
driving, cars are the only place where accessing web sites on
a regular basis is not possible, yet. Reports from the U.S.
Department of Transportation[4] revealed that 20 percent
of injury crashes involved distracted driving. While driving
a vehicle browsing the Web by using the car’s head unit
would distract the user and puts the drivers’ safety at risk.
Therefore, when bringing Internet to the car a speech-based
interface which provides a driver-convenient, audible representation
of the content needs to be developed. Currently,
browsing the World Wide Web is only achieved by using
haptic input modalities and a visual browser representation.
Copyright held by author(s)
Automotive UI ’11, November 29-December 2, 2011, Salzburg, Austria
Adjunct Proceedings.
- 9 -
Andreas Eberhardt
BitTwister IT GmbH
Senden, Germany
andreas.eberhardt@bittwister.com
However, in a driving environment this user interface is not
feasible. Therefore, it is crucial to develop an intelligent web
scraping algorithm which transforms semi-structured Web
content in a representation accessible by the speech dialog.
Attempts to access the World Wide Web by speech have
been made in different ways. Poon et al.[5], amongst others,
have introduced voice browsers which is not applicable in
the automotive environment due to high cognitive load and
time consumption. In the SmartWeb project[1] the user can
ask questions about the Soccer World Cup and the system
provides answers retrieved from amongst others, a knowledge
base containing information extracted from the FIFA
web site. Nevertheless, this algorithm is only able to extract
information from dedicated web sites with known web page
structures.
In this paper, we present a speech dialog system (SDS)
designed in a driver convenient way which allows the user
to retrieve topic related information from the World Wide
Web which is available in an HTML structure. The core
component of the proposed approach is an ontology which
models the mentioned topics. The speech dialog is modelled
according to the ontology and the information extraction
(IE) component parses HTML code against the predefined
semantic net. In this way, information from web sites with
unknown web page structures can be extracted, understood
and accessed by speech.
2. INFORMATION EXTRACTION FROM
SEMI-STRUCTURED WEB SITES
Previous approaches to IE from web sites focus on the web
page and try to extract relevant information only from the
corresponding HTML DOM tree. In our approach, we first
define an ontology to a certain topic and use topic-related
web sites as our source to find matching information. The
ontology the web site’s content is mapped on is defined in
KL-ONE[2] because of its simplicity and sufficient modeling
abilities. The IE and the semantic analysis of a web site is
illustrated in Figure 1 and explained in the following.
First, the HTML parser analyzes the web site and generates
a preliminary internal graph representation. Hereby,
dynamic contents are processed, embedded frames are loaded
and referenced web pages are taken into consideration.
In the second step, the text parser analyzes the textual
content. By applying topic-oriented grammar definitions,
the text parser generates initial concept hypotheses of the
semantic model for each textual content.
Since the following matching algorithm is computationally
intensive, the current cyclic graph needs to be transformed