Multimodality and Vagueness in the Context of a Graphical, Object-Oriented Materials Information System

Computer Science Department, University of Leipzig D-04109 Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] In the context of an extended understanding of information retrieval, multimodality and vagueness are discussed as key problems of materials information system development. The WING-M2 prototype is presented which combines an object-oriented graphical interface with natural language fe edback a nd correction functionality as well as additional components for graphical result querying and vague formulation of user needs. System development in WING-IIR is based on the rapid prototyping paradigm in combination with user tests in the application domain , materials information systems. Our design enhances traditional parallelized multimodal system structures by tailoring multimodality features to the respective advantages of different query modes . This approach seems to be of special importance for dealing with iterative retrieval strategies. Vagueness in user needs is addressed in different modalities : The graph ical query module allows for visual specification of follow-up queries in line chart representations of factual data . It exploits the materials experts' visual interpretation of given data for graphical query formulation . The fuzzy-logic component of WING-M2 applies vague concepts to query interpretation in different modalities (e .g. by modeling linguistic variables like high as fuzzy concepts).