A domain-specific textual language for rapid prototyping of multimodal interactive systems

Abstract

There are currently toolkits that allow the specification of executable multimodal human-machine interaction models. Some provide domain-specific visual languages with which a broad range of interactions can be modeled but at the expense of bulky diagrams. Others instead, interpret concise specifications written in existing textual languages even though their non-specialized notations prevent the productivity improvement achievable through domain-specific ones. We propose a domain-specific textual language and its supporting toolkit; they both overcome the shortcomings of the existing approaches while retaining their strengths. The language provides notations and constructs specially tailored to compactly declare the event patterns raised during the execution of multimodal commands. The toolkit detects the occurrence of these patterns and invokes the functionality of a back-end system in response.