CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

On construction, performance, and diversification for structured queries on the semantic desktop

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LAPI @ 2016 Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task: A Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Diversification Perspective

ABSTRACT In this paper we present the results achieved during the 2016 MediaEval Retrieving Diverse Social Images Task, using an approach based on pseudo-relevance feedback, in which human feedback is replaced by an automatic selection of images. The proposed approach is designed to have in priority the diversification of the results, in contrast to most of the existing techniques that address only the relevance. Diversification is achieved by exploiting a hierarchical clustering scheme followed by a diversification strategy. Methods are tested on the benchmarking data and results are analyzed. Insights for future work conclude the paper

Overview of ImageCLEF lifelog 2017: lifelog retrieval and summarization

Despite the increasing number of successful related work- shops and panels, lifelogging has rarely been the subject of a rigorous comparative benchmarking exercise. Following the success of the new lifelog evaluation task at NTCIR-12, the first ImageCLEF 2017 LifeLog task aims to bring the attention of lifelogging to a wide audience and to promote research into some of the key challenges of the coming years. The ImageCLEF 2017 LifeLog task aims to be a comparative evaluation framework for information access and retrieval systems operating over personal lifelog data. Two subtasks were available to participants; all tasks use a single mixed modality data source from three lifeloggers for a period of about one month each. The data contains a large collection of wearable camera images, an XML description of the semantic locations, as well as the physical activities of the lifeloggers. Additional visual concept information was also provided by exploiting the Caffe CNN-based visual concept detector. For the two sub-tasks, 51 topics were chosen based on the real interests of the lifeloggers. In this first year three groups participated in the task, submitting 19 runs across all subtasks, and all participants also provided working notes papers. In general, the groups performance is very good across the tasks, and there are interesting insights into these very relevant challenges

Recuperação multimodal e interativa de informação orientada por diversidade

Orientador: Ricardo da Silva TorresTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Os métodos de Recuperação da Informação, especialmente considerando-se dados multimídia, evoluíram para a integração de múltiplas fontes de evidência na análise de relevância de itens em uma tarefa de busca. Neste contexto, para atenuar a distância semântica entre as propriedades de baixo nível extraídas do conteúdo dos objetos digitais e os conceitos semânticos de alto nível (objetos, categorias, etc.) e tornar estes sistemas adaptativos às diferentes necessidades dos usuários, modelos interativos que consideram o usuário mais próximo do processo de recuperação têm sido propostos, permitindo a sua interação com o sistema, principalmente por meio da realimentação de relevância implícita ou explícita. Analogamente, a promoção de diversidade surgiu como uma alternativa para lidar com consultas ambíguas ou incompletas. Adicionalmente, muitos trabalhos têm tratado a ideia de minimização do esforço requerido do usuário em fornecer julgamentos de relevância, à medida que mantém níveis aceitáveis de eficácia. Esta tese aborda, propõe e analisa experimentalmente métodos de recuperação da informação interativos e multimodais orientados por diversidade. Este trabalho aborda de forma abrangente a literatura acerca da recuperação interativa da informação e discute sobre os avanços recentes, os grandes desafios de pesquisa e oportunidades promissoras de trabalho. Nós propusemos e avaliamos dois métodos de aprimoramento do balanço entre relevância e diversidade, os quais integram múltiplas informações de imagens, tais como: propriedades visuais, metadados textuais, informação geográfica e descritores de credibilidade dos usuários. Por sua vez, como integração de técnicas de recuperação interativa e de promoção de diversidade, visando maximizar a cobertura de múltiplas interpretações/aspectos de busca e acelerar a transferência de informação entre o usuário e o sistema, nós propusemos e avaliamos um método multimodal de aprendizado para ranqueamento utilizando realimentação de relevância sobre resultados diversificados. Nossa análise experimental mostra que o uso conjunto de múltiplas fontes de informação teve impacto positivo nos algoritmos de balanceamento entre relevância e diversidade. Estes resultados sugerem que a integração de filtragem e re-ranqueamento multimodais é eficaz para o aumento da relevância dos resultados e também como mecanismo de potencialização dos métodos de diversificação. Além disso, com uma análise experimental minuciosa, nós investigamos várias questões de pesquisa relacionadas à possibilidade de aumento da diversidade dos resultados e a manutenção ou até mesmo melhoria da sua relevância em sessões interativas. Adicionalmente, nós analisamos como o esforço em diversificar afeta os resultados gerais de uma sessão de busca e como diferentes abordagens de diversificação se comportam para diferentes modalidades de dados. Analisando a eficácia geral e também em cada iteração de realimentação de relevância, nós mostramos que introduzir diversidade nos resultados pode prejudicar resultados iniciais, enquanto que aumenta significativamente a eficácia geral em uma sessão de busca, considerando-se não apenas a relevância e diversidade geral, mas também o quão cedo o usuário é exposto ao mesmo montante de itens relevantes e nível de diversidadeAbstract: Information retrieval methods, especially considering multimedia data, have evolved towards the integration of multiple sources of evidence in the analysis of the relevance of items considering a given user search task. In this context, for attenuating the semantic gap between low-level features extracted from the content of the digital objects and high-level semantic concepts (objects, categories, etc.) and making the systems adaptive to different user needs, interactive models have brought the user closer to the retrieval loop allowing user-system interaction mainly through implicit or explicit relevance feedback. Analogously, diversity promotion has emerged as an alternative for tackling ambiguous or underspecified queries. Additionally, several works have addressed the issue of minimizing the required user effort on providing relevance assessments while keeping an acceptable overall effectiveness. This thesis discusses, proposes, and experimentally analyzes multimodal and interactive diversity-oriented information retrieval methods. This work, comprehensively covers the interactive information retrieval literature and also discusses about recent advances, the great research challenges, and promising research opportunities. We have proposed and evaluated two relevance-diversity trade-off enhancement work-flows, which integrate multiple information from images, such as: visual features, textual metadata, geographic information, and user credibility descriptors. In turn, as an integration of interactive retrieval and diversity promotion techniques, for maximizing the coverage of multiple query interpretations/aspects and speeding up the information transfer between the user and the system, we have proposed and evaluated a multimodal learning-to-rank method trained with relevance feedback over diversified results. Our experimental analysis shows that the joint usage of multiple information sources positively impacted the relevance-diversity balancing algorithms. Our results also suggest that the integration of multimodal-relevance-based filtering and reranking was effective on improving result relevance and also boosted diversity promotion methods. Beyond it, with a thorough experimental analysis we have investigated several research questions related to the possibility of improving result diversity and keeping or even improving relevance in interactive search sessions. Moreover, we analyze how much the diversification effort affects overall search session results and how different diversification approaches behave for the different data modalities. By analyzing the overall and per feedback iteration effectiveness, we show that introducing diversity may harm initial results whereas it significantly enhances the overall session effectiveness not only considering the relevance and diversity, but also how early the user is exposed to the same amount of relevant items and diversityDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da ComputaçãoP-4388/2010140977/2012-0CAPESCNP

Overview of the Multimedia Information Processing for Personality and Social Networks Analysis Contest

International audienceProgress in the autonomous analysis of human behavior from multimodal information has lead to very effective methods able to deal with problems like action/gesture/activity recognition, pose estimation, opinion mining, user tailored retrieval, etc. However, it is only recently that the community has been starting to look into related problems associated with more complex behavior, including personality analysis, deception detection, among others. We organized an academic contest co-located with ICPR2018 running two tasks in this direction. On the one hand, we organized an information fusion task in the context of multi-modal image retrieval in social media. On the other hand, we ran another task in which we aim to infer personality traits from written essays, including textual and handwritten information. This paper describes both tasks, detailing for each of them the associated problem, data sets, evaluation metrics and protocol, as well as an analysis of the performance of simple baselines

Rethinking summarization and storytelling for modern social multimedia

Traditional summarization initiatives have been focused on specific types of documents such as articles, reviews, videos, image feeds, or tweets, a practice which may result in pigeonholing the summarization task in the context of modern, content-rich multimedia collections. Consequently, much of the research to date has revolved around mostly toy problems in narrow domains and working on single-source media types. We argue that summarization and story generation systems need to re-focus the problem space in order to meet the information needs in the age of user-generated content in different formats and languages. Here we create a framework for flexible multimedia storytelling. Narratives, stories, and summaries carry a set of challenges in big data and dynamic multi-source media that give rise to new research in spatial-temporal representation, viewpoint generation, and explanatio

Overview of ImageCLEF 2018: Challenges, Datasets and Evaluation

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2018 evaluation campaign, an event that was organized as part of the CLEF (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum) Labs 2018. ImageCLEF is an ongoing initiative (it started in 2003) that promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing and retrieval with the aim of providing information access to collections of images in various usage scenarios and domains. In 2018, the 16th edition of ImageCLEF ran three main tasks and a pilot task: (1) a caption prediction task that aims at predicting the caption of a figure from the biomedical literature based only on the figure image; (2) a tuberculosis task that aims at detecting the tuberculosis type, severity and drug resistance from CT (Computed Tomography) volumes of the lung; (3) a LifeLog task (videos, images and other sources) about daily activities understanding and moment retrieval, and (4) a pilot task on visual question answering where systems are tasked with answering medical questions. The strong participation, with over 100 research groups registering and 31 submitting results for the tasks, shows an increasing interest in this benchmarking campaign