Solving ambiguities for sketch-based interaction in mobile environments

The diffusion of mobile devices and the development of their services and applications are connected with the possibility to communicate anytime and anywhere according to a natural approach, which combines different modalities (speech, sketch, etc.). A natural communication approach, such as sketch-based interaction, frequently produces ambiguities. Ambiguities can arise in sketch recognition process by the gap between the user's intention and the system interpretation. This paper presents a classification of meaningful ambiguities in sketchbased interaction and discusses methods to solve them taking into account of the spatial and temporal information that characterise the drawing process. The proposed solution methods use both sketch-based approaches and/or integrated approaches with other modalities. They are classified in: prevention, a-posteriori and approximation methods.