Generating Multilingual Personalized Descriptions of Museum Exhibits - The M-PIRO Project

TL;DR

The M-PIRO project develops multilingual, personalized description generation for museum exhibits, enabling tailored, automatic textual and spoken content in multiple languages for web and virtual environments.

Contribution

It introduces a system that generates multilingual, personalized exhibit descriptions from a language-independent database, with curator-controlled authoring tools.

Findings

Demonstrator supports English, Greek, and Italian.

System generates descriptions tailored to user backgrounds and interactions.

Prototype showcases potential for automated museum content creation.

Abstract

This paper provides an overall presentation of the M-PIRO project. M-PIRO is developing technology that will allow museums to generate automatically textual or spoken descriptions of exhibits for collections available over the Web or in virtual reality environments. The descriptions are generated in several languages from information in a language-independent database and small fragments of text, and they can be tailored according to the backgrounds of the users, their ages, and their previous interaction with the system. An authoring tool allows museum curators to update the system's database and to control the language and content of the resulting descriptions. Although the project is still in progress, a Web-based demonstrator that supports English, Greek and Italian is already available, and it is used throughout the paper to highlight the capabilities of the emerging technology.