Publication
SmartWeb Handheld Interaction: General Interactions and Result Display for User-System Multimodal Dialogue
Daniel Sonntag; Norbert Reithinger
SmartWeb Technical Report, DFKI, DFKI Technical Memos, Vol. V 1.1, 2007.
Abstract
Question answering (QA) has become one of the fastest growing topics in computational linguistics and information access. In this context, SmartWeb (http://www.smartweb-projekt.de/) was a large-scale German research project that aimed to provide intuitive multimodal access to a rich selection of Web-based information services. In one of the main scenarios, the user interacts with a smartphone client interface, and asks natural language questions, to access the Semantic Web. The demonstrator systems were developed between 2004 and 2007 by partners from academia and industry. This document provides the interaction storyboard (the multimodal design of SmartWeb handheld's interaction), and a description of the actual implementation.
We decided to publish this technical document in a second version in the context of the THESEUS project (http://www.theseus-programm.de) since this SmartWeb document provided many suggestions for the THESEUS usability guidelines (http://www.dfki.de/~sonntag/interactiondesign.htm) and the implementation of the THESEUS TEXO demonstrators. Theseus is the German flagship project on the Internet of Services, where the user can delegate complex tasks to dynamically composed semantic web services by utilizing multimodal interaction combining speech and multi-touch input on advanced smartphones.
More information on SmartWeb's technical question-answering software architecture and the underlying multimodal dialogue system, which is further developed and commercialized in the THESEUS project, can be found in the book: "Ontologies and Adaptivity in Dialogue for Question Answering".