Extending a dialog model with contextual knowledge

Abstract

Designing and exploring multimodal interaction techniques, such as those used in virtual environments, can be facilitated by using high-level notations. Besides task modelling, notations have been introduced at the dialog level such as our notation NiMMiT. For advanced interaction techniques, there is not yet an established approach to decide when to stop detailing the task model and continue modelling at the dialog level. Also, context-awareness is usually introduced at the task level and not at the dialog level. We show that this might cause an explosion in the amount of dialog states in situations where context-aware multimodal interaction is used in one and the same task. Therefore, we propose an approach which attempts to introduce contextual knowledge at the dialog level where transitions are chosen upon context information. We validate our approach in a case study from which we conclude that the augmented notation is easy to use and successfully introduces context at the dialog level.