Europeana Generic Services Projects Meeting, 29-30 October 2018, The Hague Alexander Raginsky - Culture Chatbot for Europeana

1. Culture Chatbot
Alexander Raginsky, Pangeanic
Europeana Generic Services Meeting, Oсt. 2018

2. Agenda
● Why chatbot for Europeana?
● Search-related issues
● Architecture
● Validation and testing
● Deployment models

3. Project
● 1/09/18-1/03/20
● Partners
○ Jewish Historical Museum (NL)
○ Pangeanic (ES)
○ POLIN - Museum of the history of Polish Jews (PL)
○ CulturaItalia (IT)

4. What is chatbot?
● Chatbots are artificially intelligent computer systems thatconverse
with humans using natural language
● Initially created in the 1960s to simulate human conversation for the
purpose of entertainment
● Today, chatbots are abundant and offer sophisticated services

5. Why chatbot for Europeana?

6. Why chatbot for Europeana?
Data-related Issues
● Lack and incompleteness of metadata
● Lack or poor quality of digital resources
● Incoherent metadata resultant from
lacking, poor or inconsistent mapping
● Legacy data
User-related Issues
● Known-item search vs.
inspiration search
● Different audiences and
needs
● Personal preferences
Product-related Issues
What kind of product / user
experience are we after?
Enter a search term

7. Why chatbot for Europeana?
Enter a search term
a search term
Question about the search term
Answer about a search term
Chatbot = Sequence of search operations with state and context

8. So why chatbot now? (if it’s the same...)
● Explosion of high-quality tools and frameworks (including OS)
● Users ready for the UX paradigm (and have more patience for it)
● Naturally a more suitable for a Europeana content discovery model (if
done well :) )

9. Search-related issues: multilinguality
What are you looking for?
The girl with a pearl
Found it! We have the metadata in several
languages. Would you like to see it in
English or Dutch?

10. Search-related issues: on-the-fly ranking
What are you looking for?
Images of old Hamburg
We got something for your. But the quality
of the images is not so great. Would you
still like to see it?
(Ah, and by the way - you can see the
high-resolution on the providers’ site, i can
give you the link!)

11. Search-related issues: user engagement
What are you looking for?
hm...something on Russian avant-garde art
Here you go, a top selection of Russian
avant-garde artworks from our collection
Oh, by the way, do you know there is an
excellent Malevich exhibition on display in
Berlin now?

12. Architecture
Harvesting
Knowledge
Graph
Conversation
Logic

13. Multilinguality
● Culture Chatbot will support natively all the partners’ languages in the
conversation:
○ Dutch
○ Spanish
○ Polish
○ Italian
○ … and English
● Metadata will be translated on-the-fly using pre-built machine
translation engines (if not provided)

14. Validation & Testing
● Development is inherently an iterative process (even more than
usually)
● Large amounts of training data (recording of user conversations)
needed - help is welcome
● Multilingual users / data

15. Deployment Modes
● Facebook Messenger
● On website
● Twitter / Slack / Whatsapp / Telegram
● Google Assistant / Amazon Alexa

16. Thank you