An interaction mechanism of multimodal dialogue systems

We propose a mechanism to handle ellipsis/anaphora resolution effectively for a dialogue system with multimodal interfaces. This mechanism uses a new method of storing/searching through the history of a dialogue. We express the object referred to by the current utterance as the packed data of all the related terms appearing in the preceding utterances. We formalize the mechanism and present an evaluation of a multimodal guidance system that has this mechanism. Experimental results show that this mechanism achieves natural dialogue with high interaction. We also discuss a method of evaluating interactive spoken dialogue systems. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst. Comp. Jpn., 33(11).