EU Datathon 2022 teams behind the apps: Meet UNIOR NLP
_‘The teams behind the apps’ is a series of videos made by the
__EU Datathon_
[https://data.europa.eu/en/news/op.europa.eu/eudatathon]_ finalists.
Get to know this year’s teams and their apps over 12 episodes, twice
per week, in the run-up to the competition finals. On 20 October, the
teams will pitch their apps to the jury that will select the winners.
The audience will also have a chance to support their favourite team
in the Public Choice Award vote. __Register now_
[https://scic.ec.europa.eu/ew/register/dgscic/EU_Datathon_2022/e/lk/g/43770/k/]_
__to follow the finals online!_

 

Europe’s cultural heritage is rich and diverse. How to explore it
best? Leveraging natural language processing techniques and the
European data collection, the research group for computational
linguistics and automatic processing of natural language of the
University of Naples L’Orientale (UNIOR NLP) is working with a
personal assistant named Maggie. Maggie guides users to explore
cultural content across Europe, answering questions and offering
personalised suggestions. The UNIOR NLP team, Maria Pia di Buono,
Gennaro Nolano, Giulia Speranza and Johanna Monti, joined us for a
short interview in which we talked about the app, the idea that led to
its creation and the decision to participate in the EU Datathon.

 

HOW ARE YOU DOING WITH THE APP? WHAT’S THE STATUS?

We are late, of course! However, last-minute panic is activating our
creativity. We are pushing on with the development of all the modules
needed for our real-time chatbot, and we plan to have a working
prototype by the beginning of October (i.e. 2 hours before the EU
Datathon final event).

At this stage, we are refining the natural-language understanding and
information extraction modules, which allow Maggie to understand
users’ requests and retrieve the data that will be used to provide
answers. The last step will be to develop the natural-language
generator module, which also includes data aggregation and merging,
and a visualisation procedure which will offer users a friendly and
intuitive way to engage with cultural content.

As an academic research group, we usually only create proofs of
concept to test our research hypotheses, which means that working on a
complete app has been quite challenging for us, but we will see where
it takes us!

 

HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA FOR THIS APP?

The app is the result of years of research in this area, as our group
has always been committed to making cultural content easily accessible
for all users by developing systems and applications for the cultural
heritage domain. In fact, our research team has already exploited
European open data (mainly data from the Europeana portal
[https://www.europeana.eu/en]) in several experiments aimed at
improving the current state-of-the-art in natural-language processing
tasks.

We strongly believe that developing systems that are capable of
managing cultural content is a way to support pluralism, cultural
growth, inclusiveness and equality. In this respect, dialogue systems
and conversational agents can contribute to easing users’ access to
knowledge according to their information needs, reawakening their
curiosity and interest in cultural heritage.

Besides being the virtual assistant we would definitely use ourselves,
Maggie offers us a new way to appreciate and enjoy the incredible
European cultural legacy.

 

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO TAKE PART IN THE EU DATATHON?

‘Because it’s there’ (as a famous mountain climber said) and
because it’s exciting! The EU Datathon is the mountain we are
climbing to exit the comfort zone of academia made of papers and
proofs of concept. We are racing with ourselves, and we feel that
getting involved in a new, stimulating and challenging environment,
such as the EU Datathon, is the best way to get things done.

When we found out about the competition, we felt that it would be a
great opportunity to bring together all our previous efforts and
develop an app to give people easy access to European cultural content
in today’s digital age.

Finally, we think that the Datathon is giving us the possibility to
show how natural-language processing methodologies can be a valuable
means to improve the accessibility and use of open data.

 

To find out more about UNIOR NLP, watch this 1-minute video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DzPXEpQnLg].

Curious to learn more? Discover the teams and the apps on the EU
Datathon website [https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon], watch their
videos on YouTube
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jokN2NcsxCA&list=PLT5rARDev_rnik8jF6E8k5AjN5zeJmqXG]
and follow their updates on Twitter [https://twitter.com/EU_opendata],
Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/data.europa.eu] and LinkedIn
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/publications-office-of-the-european-union/]
or via our newsletter [https://data.europa.eu/en/newsletter].

Publication Date/Time
2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00
Using data and natural language processing to make the most of
Europe’s cultural heritage