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<Paper uid="A97-2012">
  <Title>Two Multimodal Interfaces to Military Simulations</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="21" end_page="22" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
3 InterLACE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> InterLACE is a multimodal interface to the Air Force's LACE land/air combat simulation system, containing an extensive real-world cartographic database of central Germany. Unlike KOALAS, LACE came to us with no graphical interface, although all the &amp;quot;hooks&amp;quot; were in place to implement a map display with animation of simulated objects.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since with LACE there was no graphical command interface to mirror in natural language, we opted instead to focus on database query (also included in Eucalyptus) and the issuing of verbal onroad route instructions to a simulated tank unit. Deictic reference was implemented similary to Eucalyptus, the difference being that we chose to implement the conventional notion of &amp;quot;current selected object&amp;quot;: objects clicked by the mouse are highlighted and remain so until deselected. The user can also select a set of closely adjacent objects with a double-click and then, as in Eucalyptus, use verbal context (this town, What's the population here?) to resolve the reference.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="21" end_page="21" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.1 Database Query
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Because of the large size of the database (over twelve thousand objects) and the need to reduce the search space during information retrieval, we elected to constrain the domain of NL discourse to only those objects currently visible in the map display, representing about one-eighth of the entire database at any one time. Hence Does this road cross any small towns? only reports back towns that are currently visible in the display, based on the assumption that this is the user's current focus of attention (this constraint applies only to quantified NPs and not proper names, i.e. Does this road cross Berlin? does not require that Berlin be visible).</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="21" end_page="22" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.2 Tank Commands
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> LACE provides for the instantiation of simulated ground vehicles (such as tank units and SAM missile carriers) and includes a number of routines for onroad navigation, including a route planner for computing paths between towns. Verbal instructions to the tank giving just a destination (Go to the nearest small town) invoke the route planner, but since the planner does not accept specification of means for getting to the destination, commands like Head north on road E2 for 5 km instead invoke an InterLACE function called the &amp;quot;stretch selector&amp;quot; that tries to find a single stretch of road (a sequence of road segments between two adjacent linkage points) that reconciles every component of the means. The tank understands both cardinal (northeast) and relative directions (left), and in ambiguous situations chooses the stretch that bears the most closely in the specified direction.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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