OOPS: a toolkit supporting mediation techniques for resolving ambiguity in recognition-based interfaces

Recognition technologies are being used extensively in both commercial and research systems. Recognizers are still error-prone however, and this results in performance problems and brittle dialogues, creating barriers to the acceptance and usefulness of recognition systems. Better interfaces to systems using recognition, which can help to reduce the burden of recognition errors, are difficult to build because of lack of knowledge about the ambiguity inherent in recognition. We present a survey of the design of correction techniques in interfaces which make use of recognizers. Based on this survey, we have created a user interface toolkit, OOPS (organized option pruning system) (Mankoff et al., Proceedings of ACM CHI 2000 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2000, pp. 368-375). OOPS consists of a library of reusable error correction, or mediation, techniques drawn from the survey, combined with necessary architectural extensions to model and to provide structured support for ambiguity at the input event level of a GUI toolkit. The resulting infrastructure makes it easier for application developers to support error handling, thus helping to reduce the negative effects of recognition errors, and allowing us to explore new types of interfaces for dealing with ambiguity. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.