Journal of Cultural Heritage 41 (2020) 152–165 Available online at ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Original article CulturalERICA: A conversational agent improving the exploration of European cultural heritage Octavian-Mihai Machidon a,∗ , Aleˇ s Tavˇ car b , Matjaˇ z Gams b , Mihai Dugulean˘ a a a Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania b Joˇ zef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 31 October 2018 Accepted 15 July 2019 Available online 1 August 2019 Keywords: Conversational agent Cultural heritage Natural language interaction Semantic web a b s t r a c t 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 thou- sands 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 infor- mation 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. © 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction and research aim The broad adoption of new digital technologies made doc- umenting, storing, and exhibiting cultural heritage assets more affordable, reliable and popular. In the past decade, public insti- tutions and private entities have launched large campaigns of digitization leading to the creation of massive digital collections, repositories and portals that allow online instant access to billions of resources, foster the development of projects and applications like virtual exhibitions, online museums and virtual guides, and also ensure the long-term preservation of cultural artefacts in their digital form. A major initiative in this regard is Europeana, Europe’s digi- tal cultural library, museum, and archive, offering public access to millions of digital objects from thousands of contributing her- itage collections all across the European Union. The creators of Europeana state that it should not be regarded merely as an accu- mulation of digital object representations, but instead its purpose ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: octavian.machidon@unitbv.ro (O.-M. Machidon), ales.tavcar@ijs.si (A. Tavˇ car), matjaz.gams@ijs.si (M. Gams), mihai.duguleana@unitbv.ro (M. Dugulean˘ a). should be to enable the generation of knowledge pertaining to cul- tural artefacts. Europeana provides APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for both end-users and content providers [29] foster- ing the development of cultural heritage applications. However, despite encompassing a vast collection of cultural heritage arte- facts, and thus constituting an important knowledge base, offering an API for application development, Europeana lacks a proper and efficient search engine for exposing its content to the general pub- lic. The Europeana portal (https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en) provides a simple keyword search mechanism that tries to match the search terms to the metadata labels defined by the content providers. This mechanism does not allow setting accurate and flexible parameters, like specifying the exact author, artwork type, artwork title or location, resulting in poor search results [8,24]. This problem is more evident when searching for contemporary authors that have an extensive opus of different types of artwork. While cultural heritage collections are being digitized and made available through online platforms – like Europeana – due to the large volume of cultural artefacts being digitized there are not enough qualified human resources available to provide manual indexing [25] (i.e., useful and accurate metadata – labelling each item with the appropriate keywords that would ensure an effi- cient search through the digital collections). This problem also affects Europeana, where the search results following a user query https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2019.07.010 1296-2074/© 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.