Visualizing Natural Language Descriptions: A Survey <s> CONFUCIS <s> We describe a practical parser for unrestricted dependencies. The parser creates links between words and names the links according to their syntactic functions. We first describe the older Constraint Grammar parser where many of the ideas come from. Then we proceed to describe the central ideas of our new parser. Finally, the parser is evaluated. <s> BIB001 </s> Visualizing Natural Language Descriptions: A Survey <s> CONFUCIS <s> Various English verb classifications have been analyzed in terms of their syntactic and semantic properties, and conceptual components, such as syntactic valency, lexical semantics, and semantic/syntactic correlations. Here the visual semantics of verbs, particularly their visual roles, somatotopic effectors, and level-of-detail, is studied. We introduce the notion of visual valency and use it as a primary criterion to recategorize eventive verbs for language visualization (animation) in our intelligent multimodal storytelling system, CONFUCIUS. The visual valency approach is a framework for modelling deeper semantics of verbs. In our ontological system we consider both language and visual modalities since CONFUCIUS is a multimodal system. <s> BIB002 </s> Visualizing Natural Language Descriptions: A Survey <s> CONFUCIS <s> Simulation motion of Virtual Reality (VR) objects and humans has experienced important developments in the last decade. However, realistic virtual human animation generation remains a major challenge, even if applications are numerous, from VR games to medical training. This paper proposes different methods for animating virtual humans, including blending simultaneous animations of various temporal relations with multiple animation channels, minimal visemes for lip synchronisation, and space sites of virtual human and 3D object models for object grasping and manipulation. We present our work in our natural language visualisation (animation) system, CONFUCIUS, and describe how the proposed approaches are employed in CONFUCIUS' animation engine. <s> BIB003
CONFUCIS  is a multi-modal text-to-animation conversion system that can generate animation from a single input sentence containing an action verb and synchronize it with speech. It is basically a narrator system developed for animating human characters with a peripheral narrator agent for storytelling of the actions. CONFUCIS can address the temporal relations between the actions performed by the virtual humans. It utilizes H-Anim standard for modeling and animating the virtual humans. It supports lip synchronization, facial expressions, and parallel animation of the upper and the lower body of human models BIB002 . CONFUCIS consists of a knowledgebase, language processor, media allocator, animation engine, text-to-speech engine, narrator, and synchronizer. The knowledgebase contains a lexicon, a parser, and a visual database. The visual database contains a very limited set of 3D models and action animations. The language processor uses a Connexor functional-dependency Grammar parser BIB001 , WordNet, and a lexical conceptual structure database BIB003 to parse the input sentence and capture the semantics it carries. The media allocator exploits the acquired semantics to generate an XML representation of three modalities, including animation, speech, and narration. The animation engine uses generated XML and the visual database to generate animation. The text-to-speech and the narrator modules also use the XML to generate speech and initialize the narrator agent, respectively. Finally, the synchronizer integrates these modalities into a VRML file that is later used to render the animation. One of the main challenges of a text-to-animation conversion system is defining a set of sub-actions that can result in a high-level action. In a hypothetical scenario, assume that the input sentence is John hits Paul with a bottle and John is in a distance of 2m from Paul and there is a bottle on a table that is in a distance of 1m from John. To realize this input sentence with a plausible animation, the system should exploit a planner to schedule a set of intermediate actions such as John walks toward the table, picks up the bottle, walks toward Paul, and hits him with the bottle. CONFUCIUS addresses this challenge by using hand-crafted sub-actions that in turn restrict the animation to a few predefined actions (i.e., less than 20 visual verbs). Also, due to limited number of sentences (i.e., one sentence) in each input and the restricted format of the input sentences (i.e., one action verb per sentence), the user is restricted in expressing the intended description. CONFUCIUS is not interactive in a sense that it does not let the user modify the generated animation.