UNICA IRIS Institutional Research Information System

Una biografia al femminile

Anticipating User Intentions in Customer Care Dialogue Systems

In this article, we investigate the case of human-machine dialogues in the specific domain of commercial customer care. We built a corpus of conversations between users and a customer-care chatbot of an Italian Telecom Company, focusing on a sample of conversations where users contact the service asking for explanations about billing issues or overcharges. We observed that users' requests are often vague, generic or incomprehensible. In such cases, commercial dialogue systems typically ask fo...

Raccontare altri spazi: anelli narrativi e disturbi psichici nella narrativa di Simona Vinci = Telling of Other Spaces: Narrative Rings and psychic illness in Simona Vinci's Narrative

Questo studio sostiene la tesi che gli spazi manicomiali rappresentano un percorso attiguo a quello dei lager perché le proprietà assimilative della costruzione narrativa e del cronotopo del lager rispetto a quelle che definiscono lo spazio d'isolamento e abbrutimento non sono, pace Primo Levi, così diverse. La disamina del romanzo La prima verità di Simona Vinci segue quindi le coordinate teoriche disegnate da Michel Foucault in Espaces autres e termina con delle considerazioni riguardanti l...

The Italian coal shortage: the price of import and distribution, 1861–1911

This paper estimates a measure of coal price for all NUTS3 Italian provinces between 1861 and 1911. Italy was a latecomer country and its late industrialization was characterized by the absence of coal in a time when the steam engine powered factory work. The new variable accounts for the main input factor of manufacturing production during that period in which the Italian economy registered a long-term growth of GDP and an increase in its industrial activity. The measure allows to speculate ...