Rossana Damiano

Storytelling on mobile devices for cultural heritage

This paper illustrates a storytelling-based application for an anthropomorphic guide to a historical site, presented through a mobile device. We discuss the requirements posed by the communication context and the idea of approaching the problem through storytelling. Then we describe the application that merges the basic structure of storytelling with the requirements coming from the communication of the specific knowledge about the historical site, the user interaction issues concerning the target audience and the technological issues posed by the mobile device. Finally, we address the evaluation issues and we discuss the results with respect to storytelling.

The interactional handling of misunderstanding in everyday conversations

Abstract In this paper, we will deal with the handling — within the conversational interaction — of linguistic misunderstanding, on the basis of an Italian corpus. The following aspects of this process will be analyzed: the author of the repair, the phases of negotiation (i.e. “the negotiation cycle of misunderstanding”), the collocation of the repair (third and fourth turn repairs are the most common patterns), linguistic and non-linguistic misunderstanding. A general distinction will be drawn between coming to understanding, understanding and misunderstanding on the one hand, and non-understanding on the other. In conclusion, misunderstanding, as a ‘form of understanding’ internal to the process of comprehension, which has to be monitored and negotiated interactionally, should not be seen as a polar process (absence/presence of comprehension) but, rather, as a continuum .

Semantic annotation of narrative media objects

This paper addresses the annotation of the narrative features of media objects. Based on a relevant narratological and computational background, we introduce an ontology–based model called Drammar, an annotation schema for the narrative features of media objects based on Drammar and a software tool, Cinematic, for annotating these objects and validating the annotation. Annotated media objects can also be automatically edited into sequences, with the twofold goal of testing the validity of the annotation—through the reconstruction of the baseline sequence—and exploring the possibility of alternative sequences. The software tool encodes both the narrative model and the annotation itself in ontological format, and relies on external ontologies for representing world knowledge and limit the arbitrariness of the annotation. The paper opens the way to the design of a general annotation schema for narrative multimedia with the long–term goal of building large corpora of annotated video material and of bridging the gap between the low–level signal analysis and the high–level semantic representation of the narrative content of the media objects. Finally, the paper illustrates a few projects elaborated with the Drammar annotation and the Cinematic tool, with purposes of artistic research and cross–media analysis, that provide an empirical validation of the annotation process.

A Replanning Algorithm for a Reactive Agent Architecture

We present an algorithm for replanning in a reactive agent architecture which incorporates decision-theoretic notions to drive the planning and meta-deliberation process. The deliberation component relies on a refinement planner which produces plans with optimal expected utility. The replanning algorithm we propose exploits the planners ability to provide an approximate evaluation of partial plans: it starts from a fully refined plan and makes it more partial until it finds a more partial plan which subsumes more promising refinements; at that point, the planning process is restarted from the current partial plan.

ACL Semantics Between Social Commitments and Mental Attitudes

There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. In this paper, we translate both traditions in a different approach in which the dialogue state is represented by the beliefs and goals publicly attributed to the roles played by the dialogue participants. On the one hand, this approach avoids the problems of mentalistic semantics, such as the unverifiability of private mental states. On the other hand, it allows to reuse the logics and implementations developed for FIPA compliant approaches.

A plan-based model of misunderstandings in cooperative dialogue

We describe a plan-based agent architecture that models misunderstandings in cooperative NL agent communication; it exploits a notion of coherence in dialogue based on the idea that the explicit and implicit goals which can be identified by interpreting a conversational turn can be related with the previous explicit/implicit goals of the interactants. Misunderstandings are hypothesized when the coherence of the interaction is lost (i.e. an unrelated utterance comes). The processes of analysis (and treatment) of a misunderstanding are modelled as rational behaviours caused by the acquisition of a supplementary goal, when an incoherent turn comes: the agent detecting the incoherence commits to restore the intersubjectivity in the dialogue; so, he restructures his own contextual interpretation, or he induces the partner to restructure his (according to who seems to have made the mistake). This commitment leads him to produce a repair turn, which initiates a sub-dialogue aimed at restoring the common interpretation ground. Since we model speech acts uniformly with respect to the other actions (the domain-level actions), our model is general and covers misunderstandings occurring at the linguistic level as well as at the underlying domain activities of the interactants.

An Architecture for Normative Reactive Agents

We present a reactive agent architecture which incorporates decision-theoretic notions to drive the deliberation and meta-deliberation process, and illustrate how this architecture can be exploited to model an agent who reacts to contextually instantiated norms by monitoring for norm instantiation and replanning its current intentions.

Formal encoding of drama ontology

The goal of this research is to lay the foundations for a formal theory of drama, that abstracts from the procedural and interactive aspects involved in the generation of dramatic content. Based on the structural accounts provided from traditional drama analysis, the theory proposed in this paper exploits an agent-based perspective on characters to provide a goal-based characterization of dramatic qualities.

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.