This paper illustrates a storytelling-based application for an anthropomorphic guide to a historical site, presented through a mobile device. We discuss the requirements posed by the communication context and the idea of approaching the problem through storytelling. Then we describe the application, that merges the basic structure of storytelling with the requirements coming from the communication of the specific knowledge about the historical site, the user interaction issues concerning the target audience and the technological issues posed by the mobile device. Finally, we address the evaluation issues and we discuss the results with respect to storytelling.

In this paper, we will deal with the handling -within the conversational interaction -of linguistic misunderstanding, on the basis of an Italian corpus. The following aspects of this process will be analyzed: the author of the repair, the phases of negotiation (i.e. "the negotiation cycle of misunderstanding"), the collocation of the repair (third and fourth turn repairs are the most common patterns), linguistic and non-linguistic misunderstanding.A general distinction will be drawn between coming to understanding, understanding and misunderstanding on the one hand, and non-understanding on the other. In conclusion, misunderstanding, as a 'form of understanding' internal to the process of comprehension, which has to be monitored and negotiated interactionally, should not be seen as a polar process (absence/presence of comprehension) but, rather, as a continuum.

In this paper, we present an application for character-based guided tours on mobile devices. The application is based on the Dramatour methodology for information presentation, which incorporates a dramatic attitude in character-based presentations. The application has been developed for a historical site and is based on a virtual character, "Carletto", a spider with an anthropomorphic aspect, who engages in a dramatized presentation of the site. Content items are delivered in a location-aware fashion, relying on a wireless network infrastructure, with visitors who can stroll freely. The selection of contents keeps track of user location and of the interaction history, in order to deliver the appropriate type and quantity of informative items, and to manage the given/new distinction in discourse. The communicative strategy of the character is designed to keep it believable along the interaction with the user, while enforcing dramatization effects. The design of the communicative strategy relies on

Storytelling, especially in the form called drama, is pervasive across cultures and ages. Though much attention has been devoted to the preservation of the physical supports of drama (e.g., films and tapes), there is a widespread acknowledgement that such tangible heritage is the expression of an intangible notion of drama. This paper introduces the drama as a form of intangible cultural heritage and presents a solution for its preservation in terms of a formal encoding through a computational ontology.After the review of a formal representation of drama, called Drammar, developed in previous works, we show how an abstraction of drama can be encoded into a digital item. We also show how the method proposed is compliant with the major initiatives for the documentation of cultural heritage, namely CIDOC-CRM and FRBR. Finally, we test the applicability of our solution by showing how the major tenets of two well-known theories of drama can be encoded in Drammar and presenting the results of a focus group of drama scholars and practitioners who have accessed the encoding through a visualization system. The encoding and visualization system have turned out to be a promising support for teaching and investigating drama.

Abstract. There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. In this paper, we translate both traditions in a different approach in which the dialogue state is represented by the beliefs and goals publicly attributed to the roles played by the dialogue participants. On the one hand, this approach avoids the problems of mentalistic semantics, such as the unverifiability of private mental states. On the other hand, it allows use to reuse the logics and implementations developed for FIPA compliant approaches.