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Extensible Multimodal Annotation for Intelligent Interactive Systems

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Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards

Abstract

Multimodal interactive systems enabling combination of natural modalities such as speech, touch, and gesture make it easier and more effective for users to interact with applications and services, whether on mobile devices, or in smart homes or cars. However, building these systems remains a complex and highly specialized task, in part because of the need to integrate multiple disparate and distributed system components. This task is further hindered by proprietary representations for input and output to different types of modality processing components such as speech recognizers, gesture recognizers, natural language understanding components and dialog managers. The W3C EMMA standard addresses this challenge and simplifies multimodal application authoring by providing a common representation language for capturing the interpretation of user inputs and system outputs and associated metadata. In this chapter, we describe the EMMA markup language and demonstrate its capabilities through presentation of a series of illustrative examples.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The W3C recommendation EMMA 1.0 only addresses inputs. Proposals for EMMA 2.0 extend the standard to represent output processing.

  2. 2.

    The EMMA language does not require the confidence score to be a probability and there is no expectation or requirement that confidence values are comparable across different producers of EMMA other than that values closer to 1 are higher in confidence while values closer to 0 are lower in confidence.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the many contributors to the EMMA standard from around the world including Deborah Dahl, Kazuyuki Ashimura, Paolo Baggia, Roberto Pieraccini, Dan Burnett, Dave Raggett, Stephen Potter, Nagesh Kharidi, Raj Tumuluri, Jerry Carter, Wu Chou, Gerry McCobb, Tim Denney, Max Froumentin, Katrina Halonen, Jin Liu, Massimo Romanelli, T. V. Raman, and Yuan Shao.

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  1. Interactions Corporation, New York, NY, USA

    Michael Johnston

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Correspondence to Michael Johnston .

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  1. Conversational Technologies, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA

    Deborah A. Dahl

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Johnston, M. (2017). Extensible Multimodal Annotation for Intelligent Interactive Systems. In: Dahl, D. (eds) Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42816-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42816-1_3

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