In Memoriam: Baobab Technologies (2000-2002)

Baobab Technologies was founded in January of 2000, and sadly, it declared bankruptcy at the end of 2002.

The company developed robust spoken mixed-initiative dialogue systems for domains such as banking, airline and restaurant reservations, and mobile phone technical support center. Several versions of the system were developed, and three of them where alpha versions for major companies in the U.S. and Israel.

Our system had the following unique characteristics:

v     Mixed Initiative:
This means that at every point of the conversation, the user can choose not to follow the initiative of the system, by asking a question, giving details that the system did not ask about, or moving to a different topic.

v     Robust:
The system is robust both to a wide variety of sentences and to phenomena in spoken dialogues such as errors, hesitations, repetitions, contradictions, omissions (ellipsis). It is also robust to errors in today’s speech recognition technology.

v     Integrated:
The different levels of language processing -- syntax, semantics, speech-acts and dialogue context  -- are integrated into one cohesive understanding process. Dialogue context and the system's expectations play a central role in the understanding process. This principle contributes to the robustness of the system.

v     Customizable:
All the knowledge foundations of the system are fully customizable:

o       Natural Language Knowledge:
The ontology, lexicon, linguistic rules, interpretation rules, and rules for the generation of the system's response. This body of knowledge has three tiers:

• Core knowledge: supplied with every version of the system.
• Vertical market adapter: additional knowledge for a specific domain, such as banking, travel reservations, technical support.
• User customization: additional adaptation to the particular needs of the user.
• Definition of Tasks:
  The tasks that can be performed by the system, such as buying shares or calculating the cost of a reservation. This involves the definition of the forms that should be filled, inter- and intra-task logic written in extended VXML, and configuration parameters that control the flow of the dialogue (such as when to ask for confirmations on certain details).
• Environment Integration:
  Integration with existing user applications: defining the mapping between ontology concepts and existing databases, and defining services that utilize existing applications and that can be invoked from tasks by the dialogue manager.

I was personally working on the ontology, semantic interpretation (mapping input text to semantic descriptions using concepts from the ontology) and interpretation of the user’s intentions in the context of the dialogue (mapping from the semantic descriptions to actions that the system can perform).

The company was founded in January 2000 by Jacob Vind (CEO), Asher Polani (CSO) and Dr. Efraim Shaket (CTO). Efraim was my initial advisor for my M.Sc. work, before I switched to working with Prof. Arnon Avron.