The IMIX Demonstrator: An Information
Search Assistant for the Medical Domain
Abstract In the course of the IMIX project a system was developed to demonstrate
how the research performed in the various subprojects could contribute to the
development of practical multimodal question answering dialog systems. This
chapter describes the IMIX Demonstrator, an information search assistant for
described, as well as its role in the IMIX project.
1 Introduction
The IMIX research programme covered four research areas:
(i) Automatic speech recognition (ASR) within the context of multimodal inter-
action;
(ii) Dialogue management and reasoning;
(iii) Information presentation in multimodal systems in natural language;
(iv) Information extraction.
An important aim of the IMIX Programme was to bring research from these
different fields together. The building of a common demonstrator was seen as a
means to this end. This chapter describes the common demonstrator. The challenge
was to find an appropriate architecture which would allow the development of
loosely coupled modules in such a way, that changes to one module during
Dennis Hofs
Roessingh Research and Development, Enschede, The Netherlands, e-mail: d.hofs@rrd.nl
Boris van Schooten
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, e-mail: schooten@ewi.utwente.nl
Rieks op den Akker
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, e-mail: infrieks@ewi.utwente.nl
A. van den Bosch and G. Bouma (eds.), Interactive Multi-modal Question-Answering,
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-17525-1_2,
the medical domain. The functionalities and the architecture of the system are
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Dennis Hofs, Boris van Schooten and Rieks op den Akker