Natural Conversational Interfaces to Geospatial Databases
Guoray Cai, Hongmei Wang, Alan M. MacEachren, Sven Fuhrmann · Transactions in GIS · 2005
Abstract Natural (spoken) language, combined with gestures and other human modalities, provides a promising alternative for interacting with computers, but such benefit has not been explored for interactions with geographical information systems. This paper presents a conceptual framework for enabling conversational human‐GIS interactions. Conversations with a GIS are modeled as human‐computer collaborative activities within a task domain. We adopt a mental state view of collaboration and discourse and propose a plan‐based computational model for conversational grounding and dialogue generation. At the implementation level, our approach is to introduce a dialogue agent,GeoDialogue, between a user and a geographical information server.GeoDialogueactively recognizes user's information needs, reasons about detailed cartographic and database procedures, and acts cooperatively to assist user's problem solving.GeoDialogueserves as a semantic ‘bridge’ between the human language and the formal language that a GIS understands. The behavior of such dialogue‐assisted human‐GIS interfaces is illustrated through a scenario simulating a session of emergency response during a hurricane event.