Contextual reasoning in multimodal dialogue systems : two case studies

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to contextual reasoning for interpretation ofspoken multimodal dialogue. The approach is based on combining recencybased search for antecedents with an object-oriented domain representation insuch a way that the search is highly constrained by the type information of theantecedents. By furthermore representingcandidate antecedents from the dialoguehistory and visual context in a uniformway, a single machinery (based on -reduction in lambda calculus) can be usedfor resolving many kinds of underspecified utterances. The approach has beenimplemented in two highly different domains