Report Generation for Postvisit Summaries in Museum Environments

As guardians of cultural heritage, museums are interested in a continual presence within their communities for both ongoing learning and improved public awareness of their collections. Thus an additional area where the technology demonstrated in PEACH can have an important impact is the extension of the museum’s influence outside the confines of the museum itself. Personalization is one key to heightening this impact, where a permanent keepsake is given to a visitor upon her exiting the museum which describes her unique experience and is immediately recognizable as such. We are interested in using language technology in order to accomplish this goal of continuing to educate a visitor after her museum visit is completed, and specifically personalization as the “hook” leading to further visitor interest. Rather than intrusively questioning visitors about their likes and dislikes upon completion of the visit in order to construct this personalized keepsake, we decided instead to use the sequence of interactions with the intelligent tour guide during the visit itself to predict which exhibits the visitor was most interested in, and then write a page-long report summarizing her tour, those artworks she was interested in as well as those she missed out on, and provide additional information that linked to what she had already discovered and that could be used to discover new information via the internet. The prototype described here produces written report summaries given the interest model described previously for the Torre Aquila museum, printed on demand, including color reproductions of the referenced artworks, and in either English or Italian