Multimodal Dialogue for Information Access: Exploiting Cohesion' (vecchio titolo: Cohesion in Multimodal Interaction for Information Access

Multimodality is a powerful concept for dealing with dialogue cohesion in a Human-Computer NL-centered system. This work is a little step in better exploiting the potential large bandwidth of communication provided by this situation. The relation among exploration, navigation and NL-based communication is discussed in general and with reference to two prototypes. Light cognitive load feedback and direct manipulation are proposed so that user and system can cooperate in mutually conveying the cohesion of the on-going dialogue. Main points are: (i) use an appropriate dialogue structure to constrain inference in the anaphora resolution process; (ii) use a graphical representation of the structure, to limit the problem of opacity; (iii) allow the possibility of direct manipulation on this representation, to avoid the necessity of operating linguistically at the meta-level. The context of the work is within NL-centered multimodal information access systems, in which basic entities are pairs (most commonly question and answer). A dialogue model simple enough to be shown in an intuitive-reading way on the screen, and powerful and accurate enough is provided by a modified version of the centering model. An extension of the discourse cohesion model, oriented to the treatment of deixis is also proposed. Finally, steps toward an overall cohesive approach to the integration of navigational and mediated aspects of interaction are discussed