Solving ambiguities for sketch-based interaction in mobile environments

The diffusion of mobile devices and the development of their services and applications are connected with the possibility to communicate anytime and anywhere according to a natural approach, which combines different modalities (speech, sketch, etc.). A natural communication approach, such as sketch-based interaction, frequently produces ambiguities. Ambiguities can arise in sketch recognition process by the gap between the user’s intention and the system interpretation. This paper presents a classification of meaningful ambiguities in sketch-based interaction and discusses methods to solve them taking into account of the spatial and temporal information that characterise the drawing process. The proposed solution methods use both sketch-based approaches and/or integrated approaches with other modalities. They are classified in: prevention, a-posteriori and approximation methods. Keywords: Sketch based interaction, ambiguity resolution, mobile environments.