Proposal of a multimodal interaction description language for various interactive agents

In this paper, we propose a new multimodal interaction description language, MIML (Multimodal Interaction Markup Language), which defines dialogue patterns between human and various types of interactive agents. The feature of this language is three-layered description of agent-based interactive systems. The high-level description is a task definition that can easily construct typical agent-based interactive task control information. The middle-level description is an interaction description that defines agent's behavior and user's input at the granularity of dialogue segment. The low-level description is a platform dependent description that can override the pre-defined function in the interaction description. The connection between task-level and interaction-level is realized by generation of interaction description templates from the task level description. The connection between interaction-level and platform-level is realized by a binding mechanism of XML. As a result of the comparison with other languages, MIML has advantages in high-level interaction description, modality extensibility and compatibility with standardized technologies.