CulturalERICA: A conversational agent improving the exploration of European cultural heritage

Abstract In the past decade, public institutions and private entities have launched large campaigns of digitization of cultural artefacts leading to the creation of massive digital collections like Europeana, Europe's digital cultural library, museum, and archive. It offers public access to millions of digital objects from thousands of contributing heritage collections all across the European Union, using a multilingual interface, built upon the principles of the Semantic Web. However, such large digital libraries suffer due to low accessibility for the general public and difficult search and navigation through their items. Intelligent conversational agents have the potential of facilitating user-friendly access to the vast amount of information in the Semantic Web by natural language interaction and by providing structured answers to the user's queries. More recently, new technologies additionally fostered the development of intelligent conversational agents for a wide range of applications. Following this approach, we propose a solution to improve the accessibility and search accuracy of digital cultural heritage resources from Europeana through a system which integrates artificial intelligence, natural language technologies, web services, and APIs.