Microsoft IR for EMMA

Microsoft

EMMA Implementation Report


Executive Summary:

Microsoft is committed to incorporating support for natural input into its products.  Input methods such as speech and handwriting expand the types of content that can be created and stored in digital form.  The usefulness of such information relies on the ability to create accurate interpretations of the data and the ability to persist these interpretations in an openly accessible format.  As a member of the W3C Multimodal Interaction working group, Microsoft supports the Extensible Multimodal Annotation (EMMA) 1.0 Candidate recommendation as an effective approach to representing interpretations of natural input.

The proposed EMMA 1.0 standard provides a rich language for expressing interpretations produced by handwriting recognizers, speech recognizers and natural language understanding algorithms.  A key concern for Microsoft as the company moves to support open file and data exchange formats is that the standards which are ultimately adopted allow for the accurate representation of existing data, typically represented in proprietary binary formats.  The proposed EMMA standard, along with the related InkML standard, provides the desired compatibility with existing Microsoft formats.  As such, Microsoft believes that the adoption of these specifications will make natural input data available to a broader range of clients, ultimately making such data more useful and valuable.