@article {828, title = {Chatbots for Cultural Venues: A Topic-Based Approach}, journal = {Algorithms}, volume = {16}, year = {2023}, month = {jul}, pages = {339}, abstract = {

Digital assistants{\textemdash}such as chatbots{\textemdash}facilitate the interaction between persons and machines and are increasingly used in web pages of enterprises and organizations. This paper presents a methodology for the creation of chatbots that offer access to museum information. The paper introduces an information model that is offered through the chatbot, which subsequently maps the museum{\textquoteright}s modeled information to structures of DialogFlow, Google{\textquoteright}s chatbot engine. Means for automating the chatbot generation process are also presented. The evaluation of the methodology is illustrated through the application of a real case, wherein we developed a chatbot for the Archaeological Museum of Tripolis, Greece.

}, keywords = {chatbots, cultural venues, Museums, RDF triples, topics}, doi = {10.3390/a16070339}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3390/a16070339}, author = {Vasilis Bouras and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Dionisis Margaris and Costas Vassilakis and Konstantinos Kotis and Angeliki Antoniou and George Lepouras and Manolis Wallace and Vassilis Poulopoulos} } @article {818, title = {Disruptive Technologies for Parliaments: A Literature Review}, journal = {Future Internet}, volume = {15}, year = {2023}, month = {feb}, pages = {66}, abstract = {

Exploitation and use of disruptive technologies, such as the Internet of Things, recommender systems, and artificial intelligence, with an ambidextrous balance, are a challenge, nowadays. Users of the technologies, and stakeholders, could be part of a new organisational model that affects business procedures and processes. Additionally, the use of inclusive participatory organisational models is essential for the effective adoption of these technologies. Such models aim to transform organisational structures, as well. Public organisations, such as the parliament, could utilise information systems{\textquoteright} personalisation techniques. As there are a lot of efforts to define the framework, the methodology, the techniques, the platforms, and the suitable models for digital technologies adoption in public organisations, this paper aims to provide a literature review for disruptive technology inclusive use in parliaments. The review emphasises the assessment of the applicability of the technologies, their maturity and usefulness, user acceptance, their performance, and their correlation to the adoption of relevant innovative, inclusive organisational models. It is argued that the efficient digital transformation of democratic institutions, such as parliaments, with the use of advanced e-governance tools and disruptive technologies, requires strategic approaches for adoption, acceptance, and inclusive service adaptation.

}, keywords = {artificial intelligence, digital transformation, inclusiveness, Internet of Things, parliament, Recommender Systems}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.3390/fi15020066}, url = {https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/15/2/66}, author = {Dimitris Koryzis and Dionisis Margaris and Costas Vassilakis and Konstantinos Kotis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos} } @article {770, title = {A Semantic Mixed Reality Framework for Shared Cultural Experiences Ecosystems}, journal = {Big Data and Cognitive Computing}, volume = {4}, year = {2020}, month = {4/2020}, pages = {6}, abstract = {This paper presents SemMR, a semantic framework for modelling interactions between human and non-human entities and managing reusable and optimized cultural experiences, towards a shared cultural experience ecosystem that might seamlessly accommodate mixed reality experiences. The SemMR framework synthesizes and integrates interaction data into semantically rich reusable structures and facilitates the interaction between different types of entities in a symbiotic way, within a large, virtual, and fully experiential open world, promoting experience sharing at the user level, as well as data/application interoperability and low-effort implementation at the software engineering level. The proposed semantic framework introduces methods for low-effort implementation and the deployment of open and reusable cultural content, applications, and tools, around the concept of cultural experience as a semantic trajectory or simply, experience as a trajectory (eX-trajectory). The methods facilitate the collection and analysis of data regarding the behaviour of users and their interaction with other users and the environment, towards optimizing eX-trajectories via reconfiguration. The SemMR framework supports the synthesis, enhancement, and recommendation of highly complex reconfigurable eX-trajectories, while using semantically integrated disparate and heterogeneous related data. Overall, this work aims to semantically manage interactions and experiences through the eX-trajectory concept, towards delivering enriched cultural experiences.}, keywords = {cultural experience, intelligent interaction, Mixed Reality, semantics, Usability}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc4020006}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Konstantinos Kotis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Dionisis Margaris and Vlasios Kasapakis and Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos and Georgios Santipantakis and George A. Vouros and Theodore Kotsilieris and Volha Petukhova and Andrei Malchanau and Ioanna Lykourentzou and Kaj Michael Helin and Artem Revenko and Nenad Gligoric and Boris Pokric} } @conference {777, title = {Semantics-Driven Conversational Interfaces for Museum Chatbots}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, volume "Culture and Computing"}, year = {2020}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, abstract = {

This work addresses the challenges of creating usable and personalized conversational interfaces for broad, yet applicable, domains that require user engagement and learning, such as museum chatbots. Whether the chatbots are standalone or coupled with virtual agents or real-life robots, the functional requirements for interaction that targets specific learning aspects would be expected to be more or less similar. This work reports on experimental semantics-driven conversational interface design for chatbots in museum settings, targeting visitors to converse about exhibits and learn information about their style, the artists, the era, and other aspects related to them. Depending on the semantics (presentation, learning, exploration), chatbot scenarios were designed and evaluated by participants in a formative evaluation. The evaluation show that user requirement perception manifests in expectations on the semantic level, instead of just the technical level. The results between the scenarios are compared to see how the semantics considered for the design transferred to the implementation and to the user perception.

}, keywords = {chatbots, conversational interfaces, cultural technology, semantics}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-50267-6_20}, author = {Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Konstantinos Kotis and Costas Vassilakis and Dionisis Margaris} } @conference {778, title = {{\textquotedblleft}Talking{\textquotedblright} Triples to Museum Chatbots}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, volume "Culture and Computing"}, year = {2020}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, abstract = {

The paper presents recent work on the design and development of AI chatbots for museums using Knowledge Graphs (KGs). The utilization of KGs as a key technology for implementing chatbots raises not only issues related to the representation and structuring of exhibits{\textquoteright} knowledge in suitable formalism and models, but also issues related to the translation of natural language dialogues to and from the selected technology for the formal representation and structuring of information and knowledge. Moreover, such a translation must be as transparent as possible to visitors, towards a realistic human-like question-answering process. The paper reviews and evaluates a number of recent approaches for the use of KGs in developing AI chatbots, as well as key tools that provide solutions for natural language translation and the querying of Knowledge Bases and Linked Open Data sources. This evaluation aims to provide answers to issues that are identified within the proposed MuBot approach for designing and implementing AI chatbots for museums. The paper also presents Cretan MuBot, the first experimental KG/Ontology-based AI chatbot of the MuBot Platform, which is under development in the Heracleum Archaeological Museum.

}, keywords = {chatbots, knowledge graphs, Museums, NLP, RDF triples}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-50267-6_22}, author = {Savvas Varitimiadis and Konstantinos Kotis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Dionisis Margaris} } @conference {spiliot_iisa2019, title = {A Methodology for Generated Text Annotation for High Quality Speech Synthesis}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA2019)}, year = {2019}, month = {jul}, abstract = {Natural Language Generators may produce linguistically en-riched text descriptions that can lead to significantly improved quality of speech synthesis. There are cases, however, where either the generator modules produce pieces of non-analysed, non-annotated plain text, or such modules are not available at all. Moreover, the language analysis is restricted by the usually limited domain coverage of the generator. For those cases the enriched input to the speech synthesizer needs to be produced from plain text in order to maintain speech quality. This work reports on the method for automatic domain dependent annota-tion of plain text, through the utilisation of the linguistic infor-mation from rich generated text. The synthetic speech from the resulting prosody models is evaluated by human participants showing annotation results for plain text quite on par with the rich generated text. This leads to improved perceived natural-ness of the synthesized speech.}, keywords = {Natural language generation, Natural language processing, Prosody enrichment, Semantic feature annotation, Text-to-speech}, author = {Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Dionisis Margaris and Konstantinos Kotis} } @conference {718, title = {A Mixed-reality Interaction-driven Game-based Learning Framework}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems (MEDES{\textquoteright}19)}, year = {2019}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, abstract = {This work presents a platform for linked legislative data to engage citizens in transparent and effective democracies. With a focus on scaling up participatory approaches from local to national level, the approach extends well established and open source tools and technologies, to build mobile monitoring and analysis tools that increase transparency of law-making and implementation to citizens. This is achieved by combining open data and open services with user and citizen generated content, in order to address citizen{\textquoteright}s needs in the context of open government. Data and feeds from trusted sources are interconnected with new and re-purposed data feeds generated by users via the social web to form a meaningful, searchable, customizable, re-usable and open data-focused personalised mobile public service approach. The framework exploits the social aspects of open data, as well as the training of users, citizens and public servants to be able to understand and demand useful public open data, as well as facilitate the opening of more data.}, keywords = {Accountability, Citizen Engagement, e-government, Legislation, Mobile Public Services, Natural language processing, Policy Modelling, Transparency}, author = {Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Dionisis Margaris and Costas Vassilakis and Volha Petukhova and Konstantinos Kotis} }