Multimodal Systems: An Excursus of the Main Research Questions

Multimodal systems use integrated multiple interaction modalities (e.g. speech, sketch, handwriting, etc.) enabling users to benefit of a communication more similar to the human-human communication. To develop multimodal systems, several research questions have been addressed in the literature from the early 80s till the present day, such as multimodal fusion, recognition, dialogue interpretation and disambiguation, fission, context adaptation, etc. This paper investigates studies developed in the last decade, by analyzing the evolution of the approaches applied to face the main research questions related to multimodal fusion, interpretation, and context adaptation. As result, the paper provides a discussion on the reasons that led to shift attention from one methodology to another.