Cristina Battaglino

An Avatar-based Interface for the Italian Sign Language

In this paper, we describe a virtual interpreter of the Italian sign language (Italian Sign Language, LIS). developed as part of the on--going ATLAS project, on the automatic translation from Italian to Italian Sign Language. The translation system communicates with the user through a virtual signer: the system takes as input a formal representation of a sign language sentence and produces the corresponding animation of the avatar. The architecture of the virtual signer consists of a resource planner, an executor of the planned sign animations, and an animation system.

Coupling conceptual modeling and rules for the annotation of dramatic media

This paper presents an ontological approach to the domain of drama. After a description of the drama domain in a cross- cultural and media setting, we introduce the ontology Drammar. Drammar consists of two components, encoding respectively the conceptual model and the SWRL rules. The conceptual model, mainly grounding in AI theories, represents the major concepts of drama, such as agents, actions, plans, units, emotions and values. Then, the paper focuses on the rule component that augments the representation by mapping the intentions of the characters onto the actions actually performed and by appraising the emotion felt by the characters in the drama. To illustrate the functioning of the ontology we introduce a running example from an excerpt of the drama Hamlet. Finally, we carry out an evaluation of the approach on an annotation task that is relevant for drama studies research and teaching. In particular, the emotion appraisal is tested on the main characters of four dramas of different nature, by computing precision and recall results with respect to a human annotator.

Emotional appraisal of moral dilemma in characters

In the narrative realm, emotions in general, and moral emotions in particular, play an important role in conveying moral values to the audience. A paradigmatic case is given by the occurrence of moral dilemmas in stories, where the character must trade off options that cannot be reconciled, each related with a certain moral value. In this paper, we propose a model of the appraisal of moral emotions, and describe an agent architecture that reacts to the occurrence of a moral dilemma with the appropriate emotions.

SimpleNLG-IT: adapting SimpleNLG to Italian

This paper describes the SimpleNLG-IT realiser, i.e. the main features of the porting of the SimpleNLG API system (Gatt and Reiter, 2009) to Italian. The paper gives some details about the grammar and the lexicon employed by the system and reports some results about a first evaluation based on a dependency treebank for Italian. A comparison is developed with the previous projects developed for this task for English and French, which is based on the morpho-syntactical differences and similarities between Italian and these languages.

Moral Values in Narrative Characters: An Experiment in the Generation of Moral Emotions

In this paper, we model a set of narrative scenarios, taken from well known literary works, and show how they require the role of moral values to generate the appropriate emotions for the characters. For each example, we compare the generated emotions with and without moral values and show how the absence of moral values would lead to an insufficient moral range.

Prototyping and Preliminary Evaluation of Sign Language Translation System in the Railway Domain

This paper presents the prototype and the preliminary evaluation of an automatic translation system developed in the LIS4ALL project. The system domain is the corpus of railway station announcements in Italian. The output of the system is a 3D animated avatar that signs announcements in Italian Sign Language. The preliminary evaluation, which measures the accuracy of the translations at the sentence level, relies through the BLEU-RAC4 metric, a variant of the traditional BLEU metric used to evaluate Machine Translation, specifically designed for sentence level evaluation. The aim of the evaluation is to compare the LIS4ALL translation outputs with the human counterparts.

Automatic Annotation of Characters' Emotions in Stories

The emotional states of the characters allow the audience to understand their motivations and feel empathy for their reactions to the story incidents. Consequently, the annotation of characters’ emotions in narratives is highly relevant for story indexing and retrieval but also editing and analysis. In this paper, we address the construction of tools for the annotation of characters’ emotions in stories, opening the way to the construction of a corpus of narratives annotated with emotions.

Narrative Scenarios as a Testbed for Moral Agents

Moral emotions play an important role in the design and implementation of virtual agents, since they have implications not only for the agent’s deliberation process but also for its interactional and social functions. In this paper, we propose an empirical methodology that leverages narrative situations to evaluate the emotional state felt by an intelligent agent.