Alessandro Dal Palù

Alessandro Dal Palù, Agostino Dovier, Andrea Formisano

The generation of natural language text from data series gained renewed interest among AI research goals. Not surprisingly, the few proposals in the state of the art are based on training some system, in order to produce a text that describes and that is coherent to the data provided as input. Main challenges of such approaches are the proper identification of "what" to say (the key descriptive elements to be addressed in the data) and "how" to say: the correspondence and accuracy between data and text, the presence of contradictions/redundancy in the text, the control of the amount of synthesis. This paper presents a framework that is compliant with xAI requirements. In particular we model ASP/Python programs that enable an explicit control of accuracy errors and amount of synthesis, with proven optimal solutions. The text description is hierarchically organized, in a top-down structure where text is enriched with further details, according to logic rules. The generation of natural language descriptions' structure is also managed by logic rules.

Samuel Seligardi, Pietro Musoni, Eleonora Iotti et al.

The design and analysis of pallet setups are essential for ensuring safety of packages transportation. With rising demands in the logistics sector, the development of automated systems utilizing advanced technologies has become increasingly crucial. Moreover, the widespread use of plastic wrapping has motivated researchers to investigate eco-friendly alternatives that still adhere to safety standards. We present a fully controllable and accurate physical simulation system capable of replicating the behavior of moving pallets. It features a 3D graphics-based virtual environment that supports a wide range of configurations, including variable package layouts, different wrapping materials, and diverse dynamic conditions. This innovative approach reduces the need for physical testing, cutting costs and environmental impact while improving measurement accuracy for analyzing pallet dynamics. Additionally, we train a deep neural network to evaluate the rendered videos generated by our simulator, as a crash-test predictor for pallet configurations, further enhancing the system's utility in safety analysis.

Flavio Bertini, Alessandro Dal Palù, Federica Zaglio et al.

This paper presents a complete explainable system that interprets a set of data, abstracts the underlying features and describes them in a natural language of choice. The system relies on two crucial stages: (i) identifying emerging properties from data and transforming them into abstract concepts, and (ii) converting these concepts into natural language. Despite the impressive natural language generation capabilities demonstrated by Large Language Models, their statistical nature and the intricacy of their internal mechanism still force us to employ these techniques as black boxes, forgoing trustworthiness. Developing an explainable pipeline for data interpretation would allow facilitating its use in safety-critical environments like processing medical information and allowing non-experts and visually impaired people to access narrated information. To this end, we believe that the fields of knowledge representation and automated reasoning research could present a valid alternative. Expanding on prior research that tackled the first stage (i), we focus on the second stage, named Concept2Text. Being explainable, data translation is easily modeled through logic-based rules, once again emphasizing the role of declarative programming in achieving AI explainability. This paper explores a Prolog/CLP-based rewriting system to interpret concepts-articulated in terms of classes and relations, plus common knowledge-derived from a generic ontology, generating natural language text. Its main features include hierarchical tree rewritings, modular multilingual generation, support for equivalent variants across semantic, grammar, and lexical levels, and a transparent rule-based system. We outline the architecture and demonstrate its flexibility through some examples capable of generating numerous diverse and equivalent rewritings based on the input concept.