Dare voce agli invisibili: Il teatro di Beppe Rosso

The article – which is co-authored with Irene Zagrebelsky – focuses on the work of the Italian playwright and actor Beppe Rosso, and it is the most detailed critical account on Rosso’s production so far. Based on original material and interviews, it not only analyses Rosso’s widely acclaimed “Trilogy of invisibility” in the light of recent political events in Italy, but it also – in its first two sections – introduces the so called “teatro di narrazione” to Italian scholars in the UK, and in its two last sections opens up new perspectives on the relationship between contemporary theatre, citizenship and political participation.

La comunicazione interculturale

The chapter is about Intercultural communication in Italy (seen from both a sociolinguistic and a pragmatic perspective), and it is structured into four different sections: “Key words/concept”, “Theoretical background”, “Good practice” and “Exercises”. Although based on the most recent research on Intercultural communication, it is addressed to both specialists/scholars and non specialists, as it is meant not only to outline new approaches and interpretations, but also to be regarded as a possible resource by civil servants and operators working with migrants. It is included in a book sponsored by the “Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull’Immigrazione” (International and European Forum on Migration Research), which gathers contributions on policy, housing, education, health, employment and communication, and it has been widely adopted as a text book in Italian universities and by public institutions.

Deception-detection and machine intelligence in practical Turing tests

Deception-detection is the crux of Turing’s experiment to examine machine thinking conveyed through a capacity to respond with sustained and satisfactory answers to unrestricted questions put by a human interrogator. However, in 60 years to the month since the publication of Computing Machinery and Intelligence little agreement exists for a canonical format for Turing’s textual game of imitation, deception and machine intelligence. This research raises from the trapped mine of philosophical claims, counter-claims and rebuttals Turing’s own distinct five minutes question-answer imitation game, which he envisioned practicalised in two different ways: a) A two-participant, interrogator-witness viva voce, b) A three-participant, comparison of a machine with a human both questioned simultaneously by a human interrogator. Using Loebner’s 18th Prize for Artificial Intelligence contest, and Colby et al.’s 1972 transcript analysis paradigm, this research practicalised Turing’s imitation game with over 400 human participants and 13 machines across three original experiments. Results show that, at the current state of technology, a deception rate of 8.33% was achieved by machines in 60 human-machine simultaneous comparison tests. Results also show more than 1 in 3 Reviewers succumbed to hidden interlocutor misidentification after reading transcripts from experiment 2. Deception-detection is essential to uncover the increasing number of malfeasant programmes, such as CyberLover, developed to steal identity and financially defraud users in chatrooms across the Internet. Practicalising Turing’s two tests can assist in understanding natural dialogue and mitigate the risk from cybercrime.

Outwitted by the hidden: unsure emotions

In this paper the authors consider natural, feigned or absence of emotions in text-based dialogues. The dialogues occurred during interactions between human Judges/Interrogators and hidden entities in practical Turing tests implemented at Bletchley Park in June 2012. The authors focus on the interactions that left the Interrogator unable to say whether they were talking to a human or a machine after five minutes of questioning; the hidden interlocutor received an ‘unsure’ classification. In cases where the Judge has provided post-event feedback the authors present their rationale from three viva voce one-to-one Turing tests. The authors find that emoticons and other visual devices used to express feelings in text-based interaction were missing in the conversations between the Interrogators and hidden interlocutors.