The following is a list of articles, conference papers and reports authored or co-authored by researchers of the Cognitive and Communication Technologies division at ITC-irst (Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica). Entries refer to papers published internally or which have appeared in refereed media - in particular, journals, conference proceedings, and books - in 1998.
The publications in the list are organized alphabetically by the first author.

Conference Papers

• Artale A., Goy A., Magnini B., Pianta E., Strapparava C., 'Coping with WordNet Sense Proliferation', in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation , Granada, Spain, May 28-30, 1998.

  WORDNET makes a great number of fine-grained word sense distinctions. However, what could be seen as an advantage has often been considered a problem from a computational point of view. A great number of sense distinctions makes harder the problem of word sense disambiguation. One way to face this issue is reducing the number of senses, for example by grouping them into equivalence classes which abstract on some aspects of the meanings of words. In this paper we will try a different approach. Although we recognize that some sense distinctions in WORDNET are dubious, we prefer to keep the semantic richness of WORDNET and to make some proposals to extend it in order to make the task of word sense disambiguation easier.

  Ref. No. 9812-19

• Benelli G., Bianchi A., Marti P., Not E., Sennati D., 'HIPS: Hyper-Interaction within the Physical Space', in Proceedings of IEEE Multimedia System '99, International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems [ICMCS99], Florence, Italy, June 7-11, 1999.

  HIPS is a project recently funded by the European Commission within the I-Cube initiative whose main aim is to study new technologies and interaction modalities that allow people to navigate both a physical space and a related information space at the same time, with a minimal gap between the two. The project envisages a portable electronic tour guide (to exhibitions, museums, archaeological sites, expositions distributed over a city, and to cities themselves) which empowers visitors to determine themselves the structure of a tour, according to their own criteria, interests and needs and which allow different information delivery modalities. The many research issues involved in HIPS include new paradigms for navigating the physical space, innovative human-computer interaction modalities, dynamic generation of adaptive information presentations, wireless support to user mobility..

  Ref. No. 9812-40

• Cavaglià G., Ciravegna F., 'Combining WordNet and Dewey Decimal Classification for Building Lexical Resources for Information Extraction from Text', in Atti dell'Incontro del Gruppo di Lavoro sulla Rappresentazione della Conoscenza e Ragionamento Automatico su 'Strumenti di Organizzazione e Accesso Intelligente per Informazioni Eterogenee', Padova, September 1998.

  One of the aspects that is limiting the spread of applications in the field of Information Extraction from test is the cost of new applications. The lexicon definition is in particular one of the main bottlenecks. Generic resources such as lexical data bases are promising sources of information for reducing the cost of specific lesica definition, but they introduce lexical ambiguity that is difficult to control. In this paper we show how it is possible to build application specific lexica for information extraction from text by using WordNet. Lexical ambiguity is kept under control by marking synsets in WordNet with fields labels taken from the Dewey Decimal Classification.

  Ref. No. 9807-06
  

• Cettolo M., Corazza A., Lazzari G., Pianesi F., Pianta E., Tovena L.M.,'A Speech-to-Speech Translation based Interface for Tourism', in D. Buhalis, W. Schertler (eds.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 1999, Proceedings of the International Conference in Innsbruck, Austria, 1999, [ENTER'99], Springer Verlag, Wien, 1999, pp. 191-200.

This paper presents a speech-to-speech translation system for tourism application developed in the context of the C-STAR consortium. Potential users can communicate by speech and by using their own language with a travel agent in order to organize their travel. The system uses an interchange format representation of the semantic contents of utterances, which is flexible and simplifies the system portability to new languages. A demonstrative prototype, developed at ITC-Irst, is now working for the Italian modules and was integrated with the English counter part developed at the Interactive System Laboratory at CMU.

Ref. No. 9811-03

• De Angeli A., Gerbino W., Petrelli D., Cassano G., 'Visual Display, Pointing, and Natural Language: The Power of Multimodal Interaction', in Proceedings of AVI '98 Advanced Visual Interfaces, L'Aquila, Italy, April 1998 .

  Communication in natural settings is effective and robust also because information obtained through different modalities is integrated within modality-independent representations. While most information is provided by verbal language, speaker's intonation, facial expressions and gestures too convey semantic and pragmatic contents of the message. In many cases, different modalities reinforce each other; as when non-verbal cues stress the most salient concept communicated by an utterance. In other cases, the final meaning is distributed across different modalities; as when a gesture is integrated inside a verbal utterance to designate a location. Under the latter condition, understanding meaning requires combining linguistic and para-linguistic cues. This paper discusses how pointing, natural language and graphical layout should be integrated to enhance the usability of multimodal systems. Its primary goal is a contribution to a predictive model that accounts for communication behaviour during user interaction with intelligent multimodal systems capable of understanding keyboard-mediated natural language and mouse-supported pointing gestures. Its specific goal is to test the effect of different graphical layouts and of user expertise on the production of distinct referent identification strategies. To this aim, a comprehensive exploratory analysis of a wide corpus of locative acts, collected through simulation, is presented.

  Ref. No. 9812-21

• Giorgi A., Pianesi F.,'Imperfect Dreams', in Abstracts from the conference Going Romance XII , Utrecht, the Netherlands 1998.

In this work we analyse temporal phenomena in clauses dependent from fictional predicates, mainly considering Italian data. We show that unexpected facts arise concerning temporal interpretation in languages such as Italian and English - namely, the suspension of the requirement that all events be (temporally) anchored (anchoring condition). This will call for a re-thinking of the vdry notions of anchoring conditions and SOT, and of their role in the interpretation of propositional attitude. Our concusions hold also for other Romance languages, and for a large number of contexts, including the contensive individual contexts discussed by Katz (1995).

Ref. No. 9812-37

• Giorgi A., Pianesi F., 'On the Morphosyntax of Sequence of Tense Phenomena', in Abstracts of the Conference WCCFL XVII, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 1998.

  Ref. No. 9812-36

• Giorgi G., Pianesi F., 'The Double Access Reading and Complementiser Deletion in Italian', in Proceedings of WCCFLXVII, CSLI, Stanford, California, 1998.

  In this work we consider Sequence of Tense (henceforth SOT) phenomena in Italian and in particular the Double Access Reading (henceforth DAR). The main focus is on the morphosyntactic properties which determine this interpretation. We argue that the DAR doesn't depend on either the mood or the tense of the subordinate predicate, i.e., the present indicative, as is often assumed in the literature on the topic. Rather, it is determined by the semantic and syntactic properties of the matrix predicate. It will be shown that the DAR is strongly related to another phenomenon of Italian, namely, Complementiser Deletion (henceforth CD. See Giorgi & Pianesi (1996), (1997a)). The generalisation we will illustrate is the following: if a syntactic structure allows CD, it does not allow DAR, and vice versa. Adopting the split-C analysis of CD we developed in previous work, we will propose that the DAR depends on the kind of complementiser introducing the subordinate clause.

  Ref. No. 9812-22

• Magnini B., 'Use of a Lexical Knowledge Base for Information Access Systems', Technical Report, December 1998, to be published in Terminology, Special Issue on Corpus Based Terminology.

  The role of generic lexical resources as well as specialized terminology is crucial in the design of complex dialogue systems, where a human interacts with the computer using Natural Language. Lexicon and terminology are supposed to store information for several purposes, including lexical discrimination of semantically inconsistent interpretations, the use of lexical variations, the compositional construction of a semantic representation for a complex sentence and the ability to access equivalencies across different languages. For these purposes it is necessary to rely on representational tools that are both theoretically motivated and operationally well defined. In this paper we propose a solution to lexical and terminology representation which is based on the combination of a linguistically motivated upper model and a multilingual wordnet. The upper model accounts for the linguistic analysis at the sentence level, while the multilingual WordNet accounts for lexical and conceptual relations at the word level.

  Ref. No. 9812-17

• Not E., Zancanaro M., 'Content Adaptation for Audio-based Hypertexts in Physical Environments', in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia (held in conjunction with the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia - HYPERTEXT '98), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 20-24, 1998.

The most important new issue emerging when allowing the fruition of a hypermedia repository of information while the user is moving in a physical space is the fact that information is presented in different situational contexts. Also, an additional perceptual dimension comes into play, providing stimuli, attention grasping and feedback. Emphasis should be put on integrating the perceptual experience with helpful information, without competing with the original exhibit items for visitor's attention. In this paper we shall discuss some of the critical issues about content adaptation emerging in physical hypernavigation, presenting the approach adopted in the HyperAudio project.

Ref. No. 9812-23

• Petrelli D., 'HyperAudio - o del Museo Aumentato', in Atti di HCITALY99, prima Giornata Italiana su Human-Computer Interaction, Roma, 9 February, 1999.

  La "visita ideale" ad un museo o ad una mostra è quella che consente al visitatore di fruire dell'esposizione secondo criteri personali; un esempio è il seguire un ordine geografico piuttosto che temporale. La disposizione fisica, però, è basata su di una specifica organizzazione dei contenuti che rende difficile la costruzione di percorsi personalizzati. HyperAudio è un progetto di ricerca per realizzare un sistema in grado di organizzare la presentazione dei contenuti tenendo in considerazione le esigenze del visitatore e nello stesso tempo l'organizzazione spaziale degli oggetti. Con HyperAudio è possibile approfondire un certo tema, avere indicazioni sulla posizione di oggetti attinenti, ricevere descrizioni con riferimenti a ciò che si è già visto o che si vedrà in seguito, ricevere suggerimenti su percorsi alternativi, in sostanza sviluppare in modo personale una visita nello spazio fisico ed in quello delle informazioni.

  Ref. No. 9812-42
  

• Petrelli D., De Angeli A., Convertino G., 'A User Centered Approach to User Modelling', in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference [UM'99], Banff, Canada, 20-24 June, 1999, pp. 255-264.

  Generally user modelling concerns a user interacting with a standing console. This scenario does not represent the HyperAudio system in use: a visitor freely moves in a museum gathering information from an adaptive and portable electronic guide. In order to provide HyperAudio designers with presumptive user's behaviour, data about typical visitors' profiles and visit styles were collected through a questionnaire. Data analysis pointed out important unpredicted situations (e.g. importance of social context) and confirmed some initial hypothesis (e.g. the relevance of visit span, the importance of a guide). This paper reports about this experience describing how it is possible to go from designer's questions to guidelines for user modelling making the best use of empirical investigation.

  Ref. No. 9812-43
  

• Petrelli D., Not E., Sarini M., Stock O., Strapparava C., Zancanaro M.,'HyperAudio: Location Awareness + Adaptivity', in Proceedings of CHI '99 - International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , Pittsburgh, USA, May 15-20, 1999.

  The HyperAudio system aims at better supporting a user while visiting a museum by combining location awareness and information adaptation. This mixing of information delivery and physical space proposes new challenges for an effective human-computer-environment interaction. The HyperAudio solution interprets the visitors behavior (i.e. physical and interactive) to create on the fly object presentations on the basis of the user model, the physical context and the history of interaction.

  Ref. No. 9812-30
  

• Pianesi F., 'The morphosyntax of Sequence of Tense', in Abstracts from Conference on the Syntax and Semantics of Tense and Mood Selection , Bergamo, Italy 1998.

  Ref. No. 9812-38

• Pianesi F., Ciocchetti F., 'Language Standardisation and Linguistic Resources: The Case of Central Ladin (Dolomites)', in Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Resources for European Minoritary Languages (held in conjunction with the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation), Granada, Spain, May 1998.

  In this paper we describe the efforts and actions undertaken to promote the development of a unifying standard for the Ladin language spoken in the Dolomites (Italian Alps), called Central Ladin, within the SPELL project (a project supported by the CEC, DGXII, Programme for Regional and Minority Languages). A great part of SPELL has been, and is currently devoted to the development of linguistic resources for the local communities and institutions. We will start by discussing the main geo- and socio-cultural issues involved, then illustrate the actions taken within SPELL towards standardisation, and the development of linguistic resources for the standard language.

  Ref. No. 9812-24
  

• Pianesi F., Tovena L., 'Using the Interchange Format for Encoding Spoken Dialogues', in Proceedings of AMTA SIG-IL Second Workshop on Interlinguas and Interlingual Approaches, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 1998.

  In this paper we discuss the semantic representation formalism Interchange Format (IF) adopted inside the C-STAR II project. We start by presenting the architecture of the formalism, and then discuss some notable aspects of the IF, namely the way it captures the informational focus of a dialogue unit (SDU), the possibility offered for encoding the predicate argument structures, the treatment of questions and of some temporal and locative expressions.

  Ref. No. 9812-25
  

• Sarini M., Strapparava C., 'Building a User Model for Museum Exploration and Information-Providing Adaptive System', in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia (held in conjunction with the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia - HYPERTEXT '98) , Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 1998.

  Hyperaudio is a system able to organize the presentation of a museum contents taking into account the visitor's needs and the layout of the physical space. The system is able to integrate a physical space with a virtual space in order to build a more general notion of augmented space: not only can the system provide the visitor with information tailored on his own interests and interaction history, but it can also support the visitor in his own exploration of the physical space, helping him to find what he is looking for and suggesting new interesting physical locations. In this paper we describe the developing of the User Model components for this type of system: we found helpful to separate distinct functionalities about user modelling. These components are useful in planning the content presentations to the visitors. A presentation could take into account what the user already knows (to avoid boring repetitions, to make new things easier to understand by making comparisons, etc...), what the user is interested to (to propose new concepts and/or location to go etc...) and the interaction way the user seems to prefer. Some observations from psychologists and emerging from questionnaires, workshops and observations about users help identifying parameters and features that influence how the User Model evolve and could be organized.

  Ref. No. 9812-26
  

• Stefani A., Strapparava C., ' Personalizing Access to Web Sites: The SiteIF Project', in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia (held in conjunction with the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia - HYPERTEXT '98), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 1998.

  The growing size and complexity of WWW made evident the need to provide more flexible mechanisms for delivering personalized information to the user. On the other side, knowledge of customers interests could be a real advantage for companies that work using Internet and want to develop personalized marketing applications. This paper gives an overview of the SiteIF system. SiteIF takes into account the user's browsing behavior and tries to anticipate what documents in the web site could be interesting for the user. The system dynamically learns the user's areas of interest generating/updating a user model. The architecture of the system consists of many components. The paper focuses on the agents that model the user interest and generate personal documents as entry points in the site.

  Ref. No. 9812-27
  

• Stefani A., Strapparava C., 'Determinazione automatica del profilo dell'utente Web: il sistema SiteIF', in Atti del Sesto Convegno dell'Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Artificiale - AI*IA98 , Padova, Italy, September 1998.

  L'impatto di Internet e dei new media sul marketing e' un tema di grande attualita' ed interesse sia dal punto di vista teorico che operativo. L'evoluzione delle tecnologie dell'informazione sta infatti modificando in modo sostanziale i rapporti impresa-ambiente. Cambiano i modi di progettare e di produrre i beni, evolvono le alternative distributive e di commercializzazione e, soprattutto, si trasformano i sistemi di comunicazione. Sul mercato di Internet, un mercato potenzialmente senza confini caratterizzato da un patrimonio molto vasto di informazioni, diventa difficile sia per le aziende stabilire il primo contatto con il cliente che per il cliente stesso trovare le informazioni sui prodotti e servizi che sono disponibili. Risulta utile quindi conoscere il profilo dei propri clienti e disporre di sistemi sempre piu' flessibili in grado di creare una trasmissione di informazione personalizzata a seconda dell'interesse dell'utente. In questo articolo viene definito e presentato SiteIF, un sistema che aiuta l'utente a filtrare l'informazione presente in un sito web sulla base di un modello utente. Esso impara le preferenze informative dell'utente osservando "dietro le spalle" il suo comportamento di navigazione all'interno del sito, evitando quindi di coinvolgere l'utente nel suo processo di apprendimento.

  Ref. No. 9812-32
  

• Not E., Zancanaro M., 'The Texture Resolution Module: a General-Purpose Customizable Anaphora Resolutor', Technical Report, December 1998.

  According to the definition provided by Systemic Functional Linguistics, the texture of a text is related to the listener's perception of coherence and is manifested by a set of semantic relations, called cohesive ties, holding between text chunks. Coreference is one of the most studied ties, but many other relations deserve attention. This paper presents a module, called "Texture Resolution Module" (TRM), which attempts to identify the relevant anaphoric semantic relations linking the current sentence to the preceding ones. TRM tracks the entities mentioned as long as they are introduced in the discourse and uses a set of declarative rules to guess which ties hold for a certain referring expression. The architecture designed for TRM highly emphasizes system modularity and resource reuse: new rules can easily be added to deal with new linguistic phenomena encountered in the domain, allowing for an incremental tuning of the module. Rules can be written independently to one another, assigning to each of them a confidence score that expresses the certainty of the guess made by the rule. Some of the rules have general validity and can be applied across different domains.

  Ref. No. 9812-34
  

• Not E., Zancanaro M., 'TRM - Texture Resolution Module - User's and Programmer's Manual', Technical Report, December 1998.

  The Texture Resolution Module (TRM) has been developed within the European Project FACILE (LE 2440). The module attempts to identify relevant semantic relations that link the current sentence to the preceding ones, by analysing the referring expressions that appear in the text. It suggests how mentioned entities are related to each other by exploiting knowledge about discourse phenomena. Since from the beginning of the TRM design and implementation, a specific application setting -that of information extraction from financial news- and an underlying text analysis environment -the Deep Analyser developed for the FACILE project- were available to help identify and specify the requirements of the texture resolution task. However, during the overall phases of design and implementation of the module we pursued in any case the goals of generality, modularity and flexibility for the new component. This justifies the TRM rule-based approach and the clear separation of the different resolutions steps, in order to simplify the tuning and maintainance of the system as well as the porting to different domains or languages. TRM can work either with full and partial analysis of the text. Therefore, the module could be integrated also in full text understanding systems: this integration -provided that the API to the underlying system does not change- would simply require an accurate tuning of the resolution rules, given that TRM can rely on more complete parsing information. Some parts of TRM can be easily customized to different theories for discourse modelling: the object oriented methodology adopted during the design and implentation of the module allows for an easy plug-in of theory dependent parts, therefore providing a flexible testing environment for alternative solutions. Furthermore, the portion of TRM in charge for the recording and maintainance of the discourse attentional state could also stand independently and could be exported alone for other uses (for example, it could be adapted to model the attentional state evolution in a dialogue system and used also with different resolution engines). In this manual, the TRM user will found a description of the approach that has been adopted to model the texture resolution process and information on how to use the module, as it is, within the FACILE information extraction environment. Appendices A and B contain a description of the functions a TRM user should know. Appendix C, instead, is intentended for a TRM programmer who wishes to port TRM to a new domain, language, or different underlying text analysis environment. The examples reported in this manual are taken from the FACILE text corpus or from real executions of TRM.

  Ref. No. 9812-35
  

• Petrelli D., De Angeli A., Convertino G., 'Analising Visiting Preferences and Behaviour in Natural History Museums', Technical Report, December 1998.

  Museum have expanded in variety and zxploded in popularity over last decads. As their number and popularity have grown, there has been a marked change in the role of the museum in society. Whereas museums have historically been oriented primarly toward collections and research, they are now increseasingly viewed by the public as istitution for public learning. All museums now place an emphasis on education that they never did in the past. [...] Whereas a quarter of a century ago most museums would have listed "education" as a distant third of their list of institutional priorities, behind collection and research, these same museums would now be inclined to state that they are, first and foremost, center for public learning - or, at the very least, equally concerned about education, research, and collections.

  Ref. No. 9812-01
  

• Pianta E., Tovena L., 'Generating with flexible templates from C-STAR Interchange Format', Technical Report, August 1998, 8 pp.

  We present a system for generating Italian sentences from the interlingua semantic representation (Interchange Format) adopted within the C-STAR speech to speech translation project. The generation task in our application scenario is made peculiar by: i) a semantically underspecified input representation whose interpretation relies on implicit domain knowledge; ii) the spoken language output, characterized by frequent use of idiomatic forms, fragmentary phrases, etc. iii) a strong requirement for high time efficiency. We discuss how these constraints lead us to develop a template based generator providing a good trade-off betzeen flexibility and efficiency. We overcome the shortcomings of traditional static templates by using flexible templates which allow an elegant treatment of phonological adjustments, morphological agreement (very frequent in Italian) and syntactic constituency phenomena.

  Ref. No. 9808-04