Using context to disambiguate communicative signals

Abstract

After perceiving multi-modal behaviour from a user or agent a conversational agent needs to be able to determine what was intended with that behaviour. Contextual variables play an important role in this process. We discuss the concept of context and its role in interpretation, analysing a number of examples. We show how in these cases contextual variables are needed to disambiguate multi-modal behaviours. Finally we present some basic categories in which these contextual variables can be divided. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.