Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for an iterative disambiguation interface. A system practicing the method receives a search query formatted according to a standard XML markup language for containing and annotating interpretations of user input, the search query being based on a natural language spoken query from a user and retrieves search results based on the search query. The system transmits the search results to a user device and iteratively receives multimodal input from the user to change search attributes and transmits updated search results to the user device based on the changed search attributes. The search results can include a link to additional information, such as a video presentation, related to the search results. The standard XML markup language can be Extensible MultiModal Annotation (EMMA) markup language from W3C. The system can generate an iteration transaction history for each multimodal input and updated search result.