Introduction
The Gravital-project is a partnership, with TETRA funding, between the Universiteit Antwerpen and the Karel de Grote-Hogeschool, Sint-Lucas. The Experimental Media Group of St.-Lucas developed a software package, called NodeBox, intended to create graphical output using nothing but a Python-based programming language.
Learning and using a programming language is a stumbling block for many a designer and other potential users of NodeBox. So one reason why natural language (NL) processing can be useful is to reduce the problem of programming. Another motivation for developing Gravital is that it makes it possible to provide designers with some first ideas. A designer should be able to upload a briefing and Gravital will produce graphical output based on this briefing.
To make NL processing possible the Centrum voor Nederlandse Taal en Spraak (CNTS, Centre for Dutch Language and Speech) of the Universiteit Antwerpen is searching for ways to transform natural language (English) into entities that can initiate and control the graphical output of NodeBox. This is the Graphical Language Processing part of Gravital.
The input of the Graphical Language Processing (GLP) module is natural language. Automatic natural language analysis can be a source of frustration for users as the variety of ways for expressing the same information in natural language is enormous, and state of the art language processing software is not yet able to handle this flexibility. Nevertheless, natural language processing can be of help when it comes to to supporting design activities. At the end of the Gravital project, it should be possible to generate graphical output on the basis of a short descriptive text. Because of the expert design knowledge used in filling in design decisions not specified in the text, this output can make users aware of possibilities they didn't think of and consequently, lead them to new paths in the creative process.
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Gravital is a partnership between the Centrum voor Nederlandse Taal en Spraak, Universiteit Antwerpen and Experimental Media Group, Karel de Grote-Hogeschool, Antwerpen:
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