Effective and Spurious Ambiguities due to some Co-verbal Gestures in Multimodal Dialogue

This paper deals with some ambiguous situations linked to the use of co-verbal gestures with a touch screen. With the aim to clarify the process for the interpretation of multimodal utterances, we study the potential polysemy of a curve-like gesture produced together with a “put-that-there” verbal utterance. We emphasize the role of the task model when identifying the polysemy and determining if it is effective (real ambiguity that can lead to a question from the system) or spurious (artifact ambiguity that the task model must resolve).