Interpretation Methods and Ambiguity Management in Multimodal Systems

Naturalness and flexibility of the dialogue between users and multimodal systems can produce more than one interpretation and consequently ambiguities. This chapter deals the problem to correctly recognize user input for enabling a natural interaction. In particular, it analyses approaches that have to cope with issues connected to the interpretation process, dividing them into recognition-based, decision-based, and hybrid multilevel fusion strategies, and providing descriptions of some example of these methods. Moreover, this chapter provides classifications of ambiguities classifying them at a more general level in recognition, segmentation, and target ambiguities, and dividing them in a more detailed way in lexical, syntactical, and pragmatic ambiguities. Considering these classifications, this chapter analyses how interpretation methods support the correct recognition of ambiguities. Finally, this chapter presents methods applied after the interpretation process and that integrate it for solving different class of ambiguities using the dialogue between the user and the system.