216 research outputs found

    Using Web Archives to Enrich the Live Web Experience Through Storytelling

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    Much of our cultural discourse occurs primarily on the Web. Thus, Web preservation is a fundamental precondition for multiple disciplines. Archiving Web pages into themed collections is a method for ensuring these resources are available for posterity. Services such as Archive-It exists to allow institutions to develop, curate, and preserve collections of Web resources. Understanding the contents and boundaries of these archived collections is a challenge for most people, resulting in the paradox of the larger the collection, the harder it is to understand. Meanwhile, as the sheer volume of data grows on the Web, storytelling is becoming a popular technique in social media for selecting Web resources to support a particular narrative or story . In this dissertation, we address the problem of understanding the archived collections through proposing the Dark and Stormy Archive (DSA) framework, in which we integrate storytelling social media and Web archives. In the DSA framework, we identify, evaluate, and select candidate Web pages from archived collections that summarize the holdings of these collections, arrange them in chronological order, and then visualize these pages using tools that users already are familiar with, such as Storify. To inform our work of generating stories from archived collections, we start by building a baseline for the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories through investigating stories from Storify. Furthermore, we checked the entire population of Archive-It collections for better understanding the characteristics of the collections we intend to summarize. We then filter off-topic pages from the collections the using different methods to detect when an archived page in a collection has gone off-topic. We created a gold standard dataset from three Archive-It collections to evaluate the proposed methods at different thresholds. From the gold standard dataset, we identified five behaviors for the TimeMaps (a list of archived copies of a page) based on the page’s aboutness. Based on a dynamic slicing algorithm, we divide the collection and cluster the pages in each slice. We then select the best representative page from each cluster based on different quality metrics (e.g., the replay quality, and the quality of the generated snippet from the page). At the end, we put the selected pages in chronological order and visualize them using Storify. For evaluating the DSA framework, we obtained a ground truth dataset of hand-crafted stories from Archive-It collections generated by expert archivists. We used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to evaluate the automatically generated stories against the stories that were created by domain experts. The results show that the automatically generated stories by the DSA are indistinguishable from those created by human subject domain experts, while at the same time both kinds of stories (automatic and human) are easily distinguished from randomly generated storie

    Media aesthetics based multimedia storytelling.

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    Since the earliest of times, humans have been interested in recording their life experiences, for future reference and for storytelling purposes. This task of recording experiences --i.e., both image and video capture-- has never before in history been as easy as it is today. This is creating a digital information overload that is becoming a great concern for the people that are trying to preserve their life experiences. As high-resolution digital still and video cameras become increasingly pervasive, unprecedented amounts of multimedia, are being downloaded to personal hard drives, and also uploaded to online social networks on a daily basis. The work presented in this dissertation is a contribution in the area of multimedia organization, as well as automatic selection of media for storytelling purposes, which eases the human task of summarizing a collection of images or videos in order to be shared with other people. As opposed to some prior art in this area, we have taken an approach in which neither user generated tags nor comments --that describe the photographs, either in their local or on-line repositories-- are taken into account, and also no user interaction with the algorithms is expected. We take an image analysis approach where both the context images --e.g. images from online social networks to which the image stories are going to be uploaded--, and the collection images --i.e., the collection of images or videos that needs to be summarized into a story--, are analyzed using image processing algorithms. This allows us to extract relevant metadata that can be used in the summarization process. Multimedia-storytellers usually follow three main steps when preparing their stories: first they choose the main story characters, the main events to describe, and finally from these media sub-groups, they choose the media based on their relevance to the story as well as based on their aesthetic value. Therefore, one of the main contributions of our work has been the design of computational models --both regression based, as well as classification based-- that correlate well with human perception of the aesthetic value of images and videos. These computational aesthetics models have been integrated into automatic selection algorithms for multimedia storytelling, which are another important contribution of our work. A human centric approach has been used in all experiments where it was feasible, and also in order to assess the final summarization results, i.e., humans are always the final judges of our algorithms, either by inspecting the aesthetic quality of the media, or by inspecting the final story generated by our algorithms. We are aware that a perfect automatically generated story summary is very hard to obtain, given the many subjective factors that play a role in such a creative process; rather, the presented approach should be seen as a first step in the storytelling creative process which removes some of the ground work that would be tedious and time consuming for the user. Overall, the main contributions of this work can be capitalized in three: (1) new media aesthetics models for both images and videos that correlate with human perception, (2) new scalable multimedia collection structures that ease the process of media summarization, and finally, (3) new media selection algorithms that are optimized for multimedia storytelling purposes.Postprint (published version

    CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

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    Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

    Exploring Sparse, Unstructured Video Collections of Places

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    The abundance of mobile devices and digital cameras with video capture makes it easy to obtain large collections of video clips that contain the same location, environment, or event. However, such an unstructured collection is difficult to comprehend and explore. We propose a system that analyses collections of unstructured but related video data to create a Videoscape: a data structure that enables interactive exploration of video collections by visually navigating — spatially and/or temporally — between different clips. We automatically identify transition opportunities, or portals. From these portals, we construct the Videoscape, a graph whose edges are video clips and whose nodes are portals between clips. Now structured, the videos can be interactively explored by walking the graph or by geographic map. Given this system, we gauge preference for different video transition styles in a user study, and generate heuristics that automatically choose an appropriate transition style. We evaluate our system using three further user studies, which allows us to conclude that Videoscapes provides significant benefits over related methods. Our system leads to previously unseen ways of interactive spatio-temporal exploration of casually captured videos, and we demonstrate this on several video collections

    Web Archive Services Framework for Tighter Integration Between the Past and Present Web

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    Web archives have contained the cultural history of the web for many years, but they still have a limited capability for access. Most of the web archiving research has focused on crawling and preservation activities, with little focus on the delivery methods. The current access methods are tightly coupled with web archive infrastructure, hard to replicate or integrate with other web archives, and do not cover all the users\u27 needs. In this dissertation, we focus on the access methods for archived web data to enable users, third-party developers, researchers, and others to gain knowledge from the web archives. We build ArcSys, a new service framework that extracts, preserves, and exposes APIs for the web archive corpus. The dissertation introduces a novel categorization technique to divide the archived corpus into four levels. For each level, we will propose suitable services and APIs that enable both users and third-party developers to build new interfaces. The first level is the content level that extracts the content from the archived web data. We develop ArcContent to expose the web archive content processed through various filters. The second level is the metadata level; we extract the metadata from the archived web data and make it available to users. We implement two services, ArcLink for temporal web graph and ArcThumb for optimizing the thumbnail creation in the web archives. The third level is the URI level that focuses on using the URI HTTP redirection status to enhance the user query. Finally, the highest level in the web archiving service framework pyramid is the archive level. In this level, we define the web archive by the characteristics of its corpus and building Web Archive Profiles. The profiles are used by the Memento Aggregator for query optimization

    Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

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    Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

    CREATE: Concept Representation and Extraction from Heterogeneous Evidence

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    Traditional information retrieval methodology is guided by document retrieval paradigm, where relevant documents are returned in response to user queries. This paradigm faces serious drawback if the desired result is not explicitly present in a single document. The problem becomes more obvious when a user tries to obtain complete information about a real world entity, such as person, company, location etc. In such cases, various facts about the target entity or concept need to be gathered from multiple document sources. In this work, we present a method to extract information about a target entity based on the concept retrieval paradigm that focuses on extracting and blending information related to a concept from multiple sources if necessary. The paradigm is built around a generic notion of concept which is defined as any item that can be thought of as a topic of interest. Concepts may correspond to any real world entity such as restaurant, person, city, organization, etc, or any abstract item such as news topic, event, theory, etc. Web is a heterogeneous collection of data in different forms such as facts, news, opinions etc. We propose different models for different forms of data, all of which work towards the same goal of concept centric retrieval. We motivate our work based on studies about current trends and demands for information seeking. The framework helps in understanding the intent of content, i.e. opinion versus fact. Our work has been conducted on free text data in English. Nevertheless, our framework can be easily transferred to other languages

    Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

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    This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students—anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one
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