Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4.
Fragment of an XML Tour Annotation.
dialog associated with it (Figure 4). Each artwork may be associated with one
or more tours, and within each tour different pieces of dialog may be associated
with different categories of reader (so the rendition of the Sleeping Beauty story
might be different for a child and adult). A tour can be any sequential narrative,
and not simply a story; in addition to hearing about Sleeping Beauty, a visitor
might also opt to hear the history behind the painting of the Briar Rose series.
In either case the active process of narration, we believe, results in a more at-
tentive, more engaged audience, and there is reason to believe it improves recall
of the material as well (Lester et al. 1997).
Unlike other annotations that are highly structured text fragments, tour
dialog is stored in the annotation files in full English text. While Merlyn can use
those fragments to build natural-language descriptions of the art and artists,
the tour text quickly moves outside the range of the ontology. Instead, he takes
the English text and alters it through simple syntactic manipulations, such as
pauses, stutters, or interjections. This allows him to adapt it, albeit in a limited
way, to his personality, his emotional state, and to the style of interaction he is
using with his audience. In this case we are sacrificing flexibility for the sake of a
well-scripted tale. Ultimately we would prefer an agent and a markup language
sophisticated enough that we could build English text from a highly structured
description of a story, but the magnitude of that problem is well beyond the
scope of our work.
Since the agent stores the annotations it encounters, it retains a memory of
every story it sees, as well as where these stories came from. He can easily track
requests for stories to be retold (or requests to stop telling others), so he can
