Possibilistic reasoning of user´s intention from operation

Human interface design for household appliances is becoming far more difficult than the one in the past, because they have so many functions and the control panels are so compact these days. The user cannot remember all the functions the appliances have, as well as enough buttons, switches and/or displays cannot be placed on the small control panels. The authors have proposed a novel human interface paradigm named push like talking. PLT has buttons each of which has a word expressing a concept important to operate the appliance, and the user pushes the buttons with a word not to select a function, but to talk to the appliance. PLT reasons the intention of the user from the words on the pushed buttons. The paper proposes a possibilistic model representing the relations between the intentions and the words, and discusses a way to reason the intention from the words.