MULTI-MODAL USER INTERFACE

A multi-modal user interface for removing a referential ambiguity from a natural language input to a computer system. A user provides both a textual input and a referential input. The referential input is provided by using a mouse to point to text items on the screen. The referential input removes the ambiguity from the textual input. The textual input typically is a query of a database and is displayed as a query in a query card. The referential input is a selection of elements from responses to previous queries. The user selects various ones of these query cards for display on the screen at any given time and points to elements of the responses in the displayed cards as necessary to provide referential inputs for new queries.