Exploring a gallery with intelligent labels

Abstract

Ordinary labels on museum or gallery objects compromise the competing demands of differing visitors, curators and educators. Although adaptive hypermedia systems offer a degree of personalisation to the visitor, they do not go as far as they might. Intelligent labelling can achieve higher levels of personalisation, and this is desirable because it leads to a more coherent and educational visit, and because the overall interaction with the hypermedia resource becomes more like an active conversation, and less like reading a static book. We use natural language generation techniques, from the field of artificial intelligence, to generate personalised labels on demand. Our system can deliver these labels as Web pages, in an electronic gallery, or as synthesised speech in a physical gallery. We discuss aspects of coherence and conversationality, and illustrate them with a simple case.