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. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.