In recent years, serious games have emerged as powerful tools for communicating archaeological knowledge, offering engaging and interactive experiences that support education, tourism, and heritage dissemination. Despite their growing popularity, little systematic work has been done to understand how archaeology—both as a practice and as an interpretive discipline—is represented across this medium. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of 63 serious games for archaeology, combining a classification based on taxonomies of instructional content, capabilities, gaming goals, and mechanisms with a qualitative user study involving players with and without competence in archaeology. Our findings reveal a clear predominance of games focused on the valorization of tangible heritage and historical content, while the processes of archaeological investigation are often oversimplified or marginal. Widely adopted engagement strategies, such as linear storytelling and collectible-based exploration, are rarely paired with more interpretive or methodological depth. Our conclusions are that serious games risk flattening the complexity of archaeology if they exclusively build on didactic narration or treasure-hunting dynamics. Drawing on insights from archaeogaming and narrative design, we propose future directions that can support richer and more accurate representations of the discipline—bridging the gap between archaeological storytelling and archaeological thinking.

Abstract Cultural heritage values are defined as a set of characteristics perceived in heritage by certain individuals or groups. Cultural heritage values highlight the motivations for the conservation of heritage properties by national and international organizations. These include value associations selected by experts and communities. Heritage values of communities are passed down over generations and help in conservation. Historic and traditional (pre-digital) narratives communicated values but not all sources were credible. Current efforts using digital technologies for the communication of cultural heritage disproportionately focuses on engagement and spectacularization. This has had a negative effect on research towards the sharing of cultural heritage values through Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN). We believe that a number of communication features can be beneficial to value appreciation especially when using IDN. In this paper, we discuss values included by the designer(s) and also appreciated by the user(s) of IDN in the communication of cultural heritage. We address four types of features that are suggested as being influential for the communication of cultural heritage values, namely 1) narrative significance, 2) multiperspectivity, 3) dialogue facilitation, 4) contextualization. We go through six case studies and show how to exploit these IDN features to effectively communicate the associated values of cultural heritage to a larger audience.

As a pervasive form of artistic expression through ages and me- dia, drama features a twofold nature of its tangible manifestations (theatrical performances, movies, books, etc.) and its intangible abstraction (the story of Cinderella underlying Disney movie and Perrault's fable). The encoding of the intangible drama abstraction of drama documents is relevant for the preservation of cultural heritage and the didactics and research on drama documents. This paper addresses the task of encoding the notion of intangible story abstraction from the drama documents. The reference model is provided by a computational ontology that formally encodes the elements that characterize a drama, for purposes of semantic link- ing and inclusion in annotation schemata. By providing a formal expression posited between drama as work and its manifestations, the ontology-based representation is compliant with the model of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).

Abstract Learning can benefit from the modern Web structure through the convergence of top‐down encyclopedic institutional knowledge and bottom‐up user‐generated annotations. A promising approach to such convergence consists in leveraging the social functionalities in 3.0 executable environments through the recommendation of tags with the mediation of lexical and semantic resources. This paper addresses such issues through the design and evaluation of a tag recommendation system in a Web 3.0 Web portal, ‘150 Digit’. Designed for schools, 150 Digit encourages students and teachers to interact with a set of four exhibitions on the historical and social aspects of the Italian unification process in a virtual environment. The website displays the exhibits and their related documents promoting the users' active participation through tagging, voting and commenting on the exhibits. Tags become a way for students to create and explore new relations among the site contents, orthogonal to the institutional viewpoint. In this paper, we illustrate the recommendation strategy incorporated in 150 Digit, which relies on a semantic middleware to mediate between the input expressed by the users through tags and the top‐down institutional classification provided by the curators of the exhibitions. Following this, we describe the evaluation process conducted in a real experimental setting and discuss the evaluation results and their implications for learning environments.

In recent years, a number of projects have been undertaken for the access to cultural heritage that rely on metadata derived from an ontology. Ontologies also open to visualization techniques that leverage the structure of semantic relations to bridge the gap between the complexity of data and the need for immediate, simplified access. In this paper, we address the representation and access to the intangible cultural heritage, that has received much attention recently and typically lacks a physical counterpart. In order to illustrate this approach, we describe two case studies in ontologies and visualization for cultural heritage. In the first case study, the user is immersed in a 3D labyrinth where turning points and paths represent, respectively, a set of cultural artifacts and the semantic relations holding among them, the second case study relies on an ontology of contemporary art and a cartographic visualization of the public art in a city.

The representation of characters' intentions in a story is of great importance for media scholars and analysts, and it is susceptible of applicative scenarios within the media industry. In this paper, we introduce an interactive system for the visualization of a story analysis based on a plan-based representation of the characters' intentions. The system relies on an ontology of drama and builds upon the unrestricted annotation provided by narrative enthusiasts and media students. The system is able to build the mapping between a library of plans and the users' annotation, and to visualize the contributions of the several characters' intentions to the whole plot. The system was tested on the analysis of a short movie.

The coverage of the semantic gap in video indexing and retrieval has gone through a continuous increase of the vocabulary of high - level features or semantic descriptors, sometimes organized in light - scale, corpus - specific, computational ontologies. This paper presents a computer - supported manual annotation method that relies on a very large scale, shared, commonsense ontologies for the selection of semantic descriptors. The ontological terms are accessed through a linguistic interface that relies on multi - lingual dictionaries and action/event template structures (or frames). The manual generation or check of annotations provides ground truth data for evaluation purposes and training data for knowledge acquisition. The novelty of the approach relies on the use of widely shared large - scale ontologies, that prevent arbitrariness of annotation and favor interoperability. We test the viability of the approach by carrying out some user studies on the annotation of narrative videos.

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.

Recently, there has been much development in the annotation and automatic editing of video segments. The major issue has been the re-use of segments through a number of different editing processes. However, the annotation of the story progression through video segments has not received much attention. This paper presents an intelligent tool for narrative-based annotation and editing of video segments. The annotation schema relies on a formal theory for the annotation of story structure in video segments and on a juxtaposition engine for the automatic editing. The method has been implemented in a software programme that has been employed, in the re-use perspective, for artistic applications and, in the analysis perspective, for cross-medial comparison of stories.

Tabula-ex-cambio is an interactive installation that delivers visual and audio content. It works as a sort of perpetual billiard game, powered by the data originating from the trend of a stock exchange index. The visual content is a real-time animated 3D computer graphics, that represents a billiard game where each ball is associated with a stock in the index. The audio content is an electroacoustic music composition featuring as many layers of sounds as stocks in the index. All the balls in the billiard are musical sources that play an iterated sequence of sounds while moving on the billiard table; each sequence is altered in frequency by the trend of the related company index. The final delivered visual and audio contents depend on the interaction with the user, who can select a view/listening point on the billiard game. The physical installation consists of a deformed billiard structure connected to a stele through cables; the stele is a vertical display where the billiard game takes place. The visual display relies on the graphic engine Ogre, while the aural display is implemented in SuperCollider. The installation was exposed in Shanghai, Beijing, Birmingham, and Terni (Italy).

Alighiero Boetti is one of the most representative contemporary Italian artist and his opus is raising a constantly growing international interest. Many of his works can be realized on very different supports and make use of algorithmic procedures. This paper presents a concert-performance for piano, five video projectors, real-time audio-video processing, an interactive chessboard, and involves a pianist, a "director" and two "players". The multimedia event is directly related to a series of works by Boetti featuring a grid-filling algorithm which has been implemented by the artist on a huge variety of planar supports through many collective projects. In this sense, the event is intended to be another possible realization of the original work exploiting a multimodal support, i.e. including sound (music and audio processing) and emphasizing the generative process defined by Boetti's algorithm through interactivity. An analysis of a corpus of 50 realized Boetti's works - all based on the same algorithm - has been conducted in order to define meaningful mapping strategies from the visual domain to music and audio-video processing. The project makes use of a networked systems for real time DSP which is controlled by wooden cubes on an interactive chessboard.

The rapid evolution of technology and the processing aspects of some contemporary art forms make maintenance and re-fruition of a number of past masterpieces a difficult task. This is especially true of multimedia installations, with multiple audio and video sources coordinated through some control device, which also accounts for user interaction issues. So, it is not inappropriate to speak of "archeology of multimedia" in the case of the remise-en-oeuvre of an installation. This paper describes a complete example of archeology of multimedia. In particular, the art exhibit is the reprise of the first truly multimedia show of the electronic era: Le Corbusier's Poême électronique, displayed at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. The show, conceived for the Philips Pavilion and consisting of a black&white video, color light ambiances, music moving over sound routes, visual special effects, has never been reprised after the end of the exhibition. The Poême électronique has been entirely reconstructed after a philological investigation through image archives, project sketches and technical documentation from Philips and then delivered in two virtual reality settings. Moreover, two aspects of the project are worth being abstracted from the design and realization of this specific reconstruction and contribute to the design, pre-visualization and fruition of novel contemporary artworks: a language for the description of the control score and an architecture design for the integration of several media sources. The language and the architecture, with a sketch of a friendly interface, are illustrated at the end of the paper.

Incremental parsing gains its importance in natural language processing and psycholinguistics because of its cognitive plausibility. Modeling the associated cognitive data structures, and their dynamics, can lead to a better understanding of the human parser. In earlier work, we have introduced a recursive neural network (RNN) capable of performing syntactic ambiguity resolution in incremental parsing. In this paper, we report a systematic analysis of the behavior of the network that allows us to gain important insights about the kind of information that is exploited to resolve different forms of ambiguity. In attachment ambiguities, in which a new phrase can be attached at more than one point in the syntactic left context, we found that learning from examples allows us to predict the location of the attachment point with high accuracy, while the discrimination amongst alternative syntactic structures with the same attachment point is slightly better than making a decision purely based on frequencies. We also introduce several new ideas to enhance the architectural design, obtaining significant improvements of prediction accuracy, up to 25% error reduction on the same dataset used in previous work. Finally, we report large scale experiments on the entire Wall Street Journal section of the Penn Treebank. The best prediction accuracy of the model on this large dataset is 87.6%, a relative error reduction larger than 50% compared to previous results.

We develop novel algorithmic ideas for building a natural language parser grounded upon the hypothesis of incrementality, which is widely supported by experimental data as a model of human parsing. 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 and have an immediate application in the construction of semiautomatic annotation tools.

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.