Multimodal interaction for information retrieval using natural language

Nowadays, information retrieval systems are widely available and routinely used by many non-skilled computer users. Therefore, user interfaces have to be simple, natural and, above all, they should not require any technical knowledge. To this end, an architecture to develop interactive systems that allow users to access to databases using natural language is presented. The performance and quality of our proposal are shown from two different points of view. Firstly, by conducting an internal quality evaluation process to measure the system accuracy. Secondly, by assessing external quality through user oriented experiments according to metrics from international standards.

► We describe an interactive query system to query databases using natural language.
► Two approaches are studied to add interactivity and assistance to our system.
► A fully functional prototype, has been designed, described and implemented.
► We introduce an automatic and a user-based evaluation for this kind of systems.