Dialogue management for gestural interfaces

Gestural interfaces are electronic analogues to pencil and paper. Since the effectiveness of such interfaces depends heavily on enduser familiarity with pencil markup of printed documents, the interface must conform to the user's behaviour and not rely on educating the enduser. Spatial relationships among the gestural forms partially determine the syntactic interpretation of gestures, along with information about the context in the neighborhood of the gesture. Temporal grouping of gestural forms is more important than their temporal sequence. Such characteristics suggest a form of dialogue recognition in which rules do not specify temporal ordering of forms, and in which multiple parses are carried out in parallel.