Vincenzo Lombardo

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.

Towards Incremental Parsing of Natural Language Using Recursive Neural Networks

In this paper we develop novel algorithmic ideas for building a natural language parser grounded upon the hypothesis of incrementality. Although widely accepted and experimentally supported under a cognitive perspective as a model of the human parser, the incrementality assumption has never been exploited for building automatic parsers of unconstrained real texts. The essentials of the hypothesis are that words are processed in a left-to-right fashion, and the syntactic structure is kept totally connected at each step.Our proposal relies on a machine learning technique for predicting the correctness of partial syntactic structures that are built during the parsing process. A recursive neural network architecture is employed for computing predictions after a training phase on examples drawn from a corpus of parsed sentences, the Penn Treebank. Our results indicate the viability of the approach and lay out the premises for a novel generation of algorithms for natural language processing which more closely model human parsing. These algorithms may prove very useful in the development of efficient parsers.

An Earley-type recognizer for dependency grammar

The paper is a first attempt to fill a gap in the dependency literature, by providing a mathematical result on the complexity of recognition with a dependency grammar. The paper describes an improved Earley-type recognizer with a complexity O(IGI2n3). The improvement is due to a precompilation of the dependency rules into parse tables, that determine the conditions of applicability of two primary actions, predict and scan, used in recognition.

A Physical Model of the Classical Guitar, Including the Player's Touch

While stringed instruments have been in use for over 3,000 years, the classical guitar is a relatively young instrument: its proportions and even its technology matured at the end of the 19th century, after a complex evolution of more than three centuries which strongly affected the instruments architecture and sound quality. The architecture of todays classical guitar is mostly the result of empirical methods. Nevertheless, modern-day luthiers find it convenient to use a more scientific

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.

Formal Aspects and Parsing Issues of Dependency Theory

The paper investigates the problem of providing a formal device for the dependency approach to syntax, and to link it with a parsing model. After reviewing the basic tenets of the paradigm and the few existing mathematical results, we describe a dependency formalism which is able to deal with long-distance dependencies. Finally, we present an Earley-style parser for the formalism and discuss the (polynomial) complexity results.

Wide Coverage Incremental Parsing by Learning Attachment Preferences

This paper presents a novel method for wide coverage parsing using an incremental strategy, which is psycholinguistically motivated. A recursive neural network is trained on treebank data to learn first pass attachments, and is employed as a heuristic for guidingpa rsingde cision. The parser is lexically blind and uses beam search to explore the space of plausible partial parses and returns the full analysis havinghi ghest probability. Results are based on preliminary tests on the WSJ section of the Penn treebank and suggest that our incremental strategy is a computationally viable approach to parsing.

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.

INCREMENTAL DEPENDENCY PARSING

The paper introduces a dependency-based grammar and the associated parser and focusses on the problem of determinism in parsing and recovery from errors. First, it is shown how dependency-based parsing can be afforded, by taking into account the suggestions coming from other approaches, and the preference criteria for parsing are breifly addressed. Second, the issues of the interconnection between the syntactic analysis and the semantic interpretation in incremental processing are discussed and the adoption of a TMS for the recovery of the processing errors is suggested.