Natural Language in Multimodal and Multimedia Systems
The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, chapter 36, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, (2005)DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199276349.013.0036
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in the development of multimedia applications. Improving technology and tools enable the creation of large multimedia archives and the development of completely new styles of interaction. This article provides a survey of multimedia applications in which natural language plays a significant role. Conventional multimodal systems usually do not maintain explicit representations of the user's input and handle mode integration only in elementary manner. This article shows how the generalization of techniques and representation formalisms developed for the analysis of natural language can help to overcome some of these problems. It surveys techniques for building automated multimedia presentation systems drawing upon lessons learned during the development of natural language generators. Finally, it argues that the integration of natural language technology can lead to a qualitative improvement of existing methods for document classification and analysis.