HALPIN: A Natural Language Information Retrieval System for a Digital Library on the World Wide Web

Designing computers with the ability to talk and understand a natural language (NL) conversation is a major field of research. We have developed the HALPIN system to implement our multimodal conversational model for information retrieval in a digital library via the World Wide Web. This dialogue-oriented interface allows access to INRIA's database, on the Internet, in a natural language mode. The inputs from the user, could be either oral sentences or mouse/keyboard actions. The results of the first experiments show that the HALPIN system provides interesting dialogues, in particular with beginners. It gives oral responses via standard browsers, for a more natural humanmachine interaction according to the user’s goals and skills. This leads to successful information retrieval, while searches with the original user interface (traditional web form) failed.