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Natural Conversational Interfaces to Geospatial Databases
Author(s) -
Cai Guoray,
Wang Hongmei,
MacEachren Alan M.,
Fuhrmann Sven
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
transactions in gis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.721
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9671
pISSN - 1361-1682
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9671.2005.00213.x
Subject(s) - computer science , geospatial analysis , human–computer interaction , bridge (graph theory) , session (web analytics) , natural language , task (project management) , dialog system , event (particle physics) , domain (mathematical analysis) , gesture , world wide web , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , dialog box , geography , engineering , remote sensing , medicine , mathematical analysis , physics , mathematics , systems engineering , quantum mechanics
Natural (spoken) language, combined with gestures and other human modalities, provides a promising alternative for interacting with computers, but such benefit has not been explored for interactions with geographical information systems. This paper presents a conceptual framework for enabling conversational human‐GIS interactions. Conversations with a GIS are modeled as human‐computer collaborative activities within a task domain. We adopt a mental state view of collaboration and discourse and propose a plan‐based computational model for conversational grounding and dialogue generation. At the implementation level, our approach is to introduce a dialogue agent, GeoDialogue , between a user and a geographical information server. GeoDialogue actively recognizes user's information needs, reasons about detailed cartographic and database procedures, and acts cooperatively to assist user's problem solving. GeoDialogue serves as a semantic ‘bridge’ between the human language and the formal language that a GIS understands. The behavior of such dialogue‐assisted human‐GIS interfaces is illustrated through a scenario simulating a session of emergency response during a hurricane event.