Asking Users About What They Mean: Two Experiments & Results.
Hervé Blanchon, Laurel Fais · 1997
INTRODUCTION 1.1 Situation Natural language (spoken and/or written) is an attractive modality for human-machine interaction. As stated in [8]: speech requires no training; is fast; and requires little attention. Text may be attractive when the utterances are short, when speech is not mandatory, or when speech may be annoying to those surrounding the user. Currently foreseeable applications using a natural language interface include multi-modal drawing tools [3, 7, 11], on-line travel information [5] (and more generally, on-line information retrieval [6]), oral control systems, and finally interpreting communication systems [8, 10]. 1.2 Interest We think that there is a real need to fill the gap between a toy and a real-scale application with a component that can overcome difficulties arising while analyzing natural language. Interactive disambiguation of the input is proposed as a reliable solution, which aims to produce more robust, fault-tolerant,