From question answering to spoken dialogue: towards an information search assistant for interactive multimodal information extraction

This paper gives an overview of issues related to extending simple question answering (QA) with dialogue capabilities, when designing a multimodal interactive information extraction system for a large, though restricted, domain. We present the way in which these issues are approached in the IMIX program. The IMIX demonstrator system, under development in this program, may be considered the most difficult case of QA, answering non-factoid questions in a large domain, and accepting speech input as well. We describe our approach to the addition of dialogue capabilities to this system. We will look at QA from a dialogue system perspective and from a HCI perspective, and consider the consequences of our choice of interaction metaphor, the ‘information search assistant’.