Natural Language and Dialogue Interfaces

The design and development of natural interactive systems requires that the specific aspects of natural communication are taken into account. Besides the capability to understand and generate linguistic expressions, natural language use includes cooperation and planning of complex actions on the basis of observations of the communicative context, i.e., communicative competence. This Chapter discusses natural language dialogue interfaces and develops the view of interactive systems as communicating agents which can cooperate with the user on a shared task. Natural interaction is considered an approach to interface design which attempts to empower different users in various everyday situations to exploit the strategies they have learnt in human-human communication, with an ultimate aim of constructing intelligent and intuitive interfaces that are aware of the context and the user's individual needs. The notion of natural interaction thus refers to the spoken dialogue system's ability to support functionality that the user finds intuitive and easy, i.e., the interface should afford natural interaction. The view is supported by an evaluation study concerning a multimodal route navigation system.