Language Technology For Cultural Heritage

The digital age has had a profound effect on our cultural heritage and the academic research that studies it. Staggering amounts of objects, many of them of a textual nature, are being digitised to make them more readily accessible to both experts and laypersons. Besides a vast potential for more effective and efficient preservation, management, and presentation, digitisation offers opportunities to work with cultural heritage data in ways that were never feasible or even imagined. To explore and exploit these possibilities, an interdisciplinary approach is needed, bringing together experts from cultural heritage, the social sciences and humanities on the one hand, and information technology on the other. Due to a prevalence of textual data in these domains, language technology has a crucial role to play in this endeavour. Language technology can break through the "Google barrier" by offering the potential to analyse texts at advanced levels, extracting information and knowledge at the level of the humanities or social sciences researcher, who wants to know about the who, what, where, and when, but also the how and the why. At the same time cultural heritage data poses considerable challenges for existing language technology: technology aimed at "generic" language has to face such disparate problems as historical language variation, OCR digitisation errors, and near-extinct academic expertise. This book is primarily intended for researchers in information technology and language processing who would like to receive a state-of-the-art overview of the whole breadth of the new and vibrant field of language technology for cultural heritage and its associated academic research in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers working in the target domains of cultural heritage, the social sciences and humanities will also find this book useful, as it provides an overview of how language technology can help them with their information needs. The book covers applications ranging from pre-processing and data cleaning, to the adaptation and compilation of linguistic resources, to personalisation, narrative analysis, visualisation and retrieval.

Communicating art and cultural heritage has become a crucial and challenging task, since these sectors, together with tourism heritage, represent a key economic resource worldwide. In order to activate this economic and social potential, art and cultural heritage need to be disseminated through effective communicative strategies. Adopting a wide variety of digital humanities approaches and a plurilingual perspective, the essays gathered in this book provide an extensive and up-to-date overview of digital linguistic resources and research methods that will contribute to the design and implementation of such strategies. Cultural and artistic content curators, specialised translators in the fields of art, architecture, tourism and web documentaries, researchers in art history and tourism communication, and cultural heritage management professionals, among others, will find this book extremely useful due to its provision of some concrete applications of innovative methods and tools for the study and dissemination of art and heritage knowledge.

Handbook of Research on Technologies and Cultural Heritage: Applications and Environments covers the many important uses information communication technology in enhancing the experience at cultural environments. From museums, to archaeological sites, to festivals and artistic events to even government institutions and public buildings, information communication technology is revolutionizing the way the public participates at and with these cultural sites, and this reference source provides both a thorough exploration of this revolution and springboard for future discoveries.

This volume covers the multidimensional and international field of Heritage Language Education, including concepts, practices, and the correlation between culture and language from the perspectives of pedagogy and research. Heritage Language Learning is a new dimension in both the linguistic and pedagogic sciences, and is linked to processes of identity negotiation and cultural inheritance. It is a distinct pedagogical and curricular domain that is not exhausted within the domains of bilingualism and second or foreign language education. A heritage language is not a second or foreign language, it is the vehicle whereby cultural memory is transmitted over time, across distances, communities, and generations. Heritage languages play an important role ensuring the balance between coherence and pluralism in contemporary societies that have come to realize that diversity is an advantage for social, cultural, and economic reasons. The volume includes topics like First Nation indigenous languages, languages in diaspora, immigrant and minority languages, and contributions from North, central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. It addresses the social, linguistic, and cultural issues in educational contexts in a new way by taking up questions of globalization, difference, community, identity, democracy, ethics, politics, technology, language rights and cultural policies through the evolving field of Heritage Language Education.

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage, VRTCH 2018, held in Brasov, Romania in May 2018. The 13 revised full papers along with the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on data acquisition and modelling, visualization methods / audio, sensors and actuators, data management, restoration and digitization, cultural tourism.

This book considers the challenges related to the effective implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to the cultural heritage digitization process. Particular focus is placed on improvements to the data acquisition stage, as well as the data enrichment and curation stages, using advanced artificial intelligence techniques and tools. An emphasis is placed on recent applications related to deep learning for visual recognition, generative models, natural language processing, and super resolution. The book is a valuable reference for researchers working in the multidisciplinary field of cultural heritage and AI, as well as professional experts in the art and culture domains, such as museums, libraries, and historic sites and buildings. Reports on techniques and methods that leverage AI and machine learning and their impact on the digitization of cultural heritage; Addresses challenges of improving data acquisition, enrichment and management processes; Highlights contributions from international researchers from diverse fields and subject areas.

This open access volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th biennial conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, GSCL 2017, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2017, which focused on language technologies for the digital age. The 16 full papers and 10 short papers included in the proceedings were carefully selected from 36 submissions. Topics covered include text processing of the German language, online media and online content, semantics and reasoning, sentiment analysis, and semantic web description languages.