Ensuring the discoverability of digital images for social work education : an online tagging survey to test controlled vocabularies

The digital age has transformed access to all kinds of educational content not only in text-based format but also digital images and other media. As learning technologists and librarians begin to organise these new media into digital collections for educational purposes, older problems associated with cataloguing and classifying non-text media have re-emerged. At the heart of this issue is the problem of describing complex and highly subjective images in a reliable and consistent manner. This paper reports on the findings of research designed to test the suitability of two controlled vocabularies to index and thereby improve the discoverability of images stored in the Learning Exchange, a repository for social work education and research. An online survey asked respondents to "tag", a series of images and responses were mapped against the two controlled vocabularies. Findings showed that a large proportion of user generated tags could be mapped to the controlled vocabulary terms (or their equivalents). The implications of these findings for indexing and discovering content are discussed in the context of a wider review of the literature on "folksonomies" (or user tagging) versus taxonomies and controlled vocabularies

Lucene4IR: Developing information retrieval evaluation resources using Lucene

The workshop and hackathon on developing Information Retrieval Evaluation Resources using Lucene (L4IR) was held on the 8th and 9th of September, 2016 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK and funded by the ESF Elias Network. The event featured three main elements: (i) a series of keynote and invited talks on industry, teaching and evaluation; (ii) planning, coding and hacking where a number of groups created modules and infrastructure to use Lucene to undertake TREC based evaluations; and (iii) a number of breakout groups discussing challenges, opportunities and problems in bridging the divide between academia and industry, and how we can use Lucene for teaching and learning Information Retrieval (IR). The event was composed of a mix and blend of academics, experts and students wanting to learn, share and create evaluation resources for the community. The hacking was intense and the discussions lively creating the basis of many useful tools but also raising numerous issues. It was clear that by adopting and contributing to most widely used and supported Open Source IR toolkit, there were many benefits for academics, students, researchers, developers and practitioners - providing a basis for stronger evaluation practices, increased reproducibility, more efficient knowledge transfer, greater collaboration between academia and industry, and shared teaching and training resources

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

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

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems