Human-Computer Interaction through Natural Language and Hypermedia in AlFresco

Multimodality is a powerful concept for dealing with dialogue cohesion in a Human-Computer Natural Language centered system. Two issues, important for a the more effective exploitation of the potentially large bandwidth of communication provided by this situation are presented: (i) the integration of navigational and mediated aspects of interaction; (ii) the use of a graphical representation of the dialogue structure to allow the possibility of direct manipulation. Examples from real interaction with AlFresco, a prototype for art exploration, are used to give a concrete idea of the implemented concepts