Art Images and Multilingual Social Tagging: A Museum without Borders

The use of social tagging for crowd-sourcing the annotation of images in online collections of art is in a nascent stage, but it has the potential to bridge language borders and reach wider audiences. How much do different language communities agree with each other when tagging images of art? This exploratory quantitative study is based on a collection of 24 digital images for which tags in Spanish and English were collected. The results show that when adding a second language for tagging images of art, the proportion of agreement among taggers does not seem to change significantly with respect to only one language

An authoring tool for decision support systems in context questions of ecological knowledge

Decision support systems (DSS) support business or organizational decision-making activities, which require the access to information that is internally stored in databases or data warehouses, and externally in the Web accessed by Information Retrieval (IR) or Question Answering (QA) systems. Graphical interfaces to query these sources of information ease to constrain dynamically query formulation based on user selections, but they present a lack of flexibility in query formulation, since the expressivity power is reduced to the user interface design. Natural language interfaces (NLI) are expected as the optimal solution. However, especially for non-expert users, a real natural communication is the most difficult to realize effectively. In this paper, we propose an NLI that improves the interaction between the user and the DSS by means of referencing previous questions or their answers (i.e. anaphora such as the pronoun reference in “What traits are affected by them?”), or by eliding parts of the question (i.e. ellipsis such as “And to glume colour?” after the question “Tell me the QTLs related to awn colour in wheat”). Moreover, in order to overcome one of the main problems of NLIs about the difficulty to adapt an NLI to a new domain, our proposal is based on ontologies that are obtained semi-automatically from a framework that allows the integration of internal and external, structured and unstructured information. Therefore, our proposal can interface with databases, data warehouses, QA and IR systems. Because of the high NL ambiguity of the resolution process, our proposal is presented as an authoring tool that helps the user to query efficiently in natural language. Finally, our proposal is tested on a DSS case scenario about Biotechnology and Agriculture, whose knowledge base is the CEREALAB database as internal structured data, and the Web (e.g. PubMed) as external unstructured information.This paper has been partially supported by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860), GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03), LEGOLANGUAGE (TIN2012-31224) and DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001) projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitivity. Alejandro Maté is funded by the Generalitat Valenciana under an ACIF grant (ACIF/2010/298)

Overview of iCLEF 2009: Exploring Search Behaviour in a Multilingual Folksonomy Environment.

This paper summarises activities from the iCLEF 2009 task. As in 2008, the task was organised based on users participating in an interactive cross-language image search experiment. Organizers provided a default multilingual search system (Flickling) which accessed images from Flickr, with the whole iCLEF experiment run as an online game. Interaction by users with the system was recorded in log files which were shared with participants for further analyses, and provide a future resource for studying various effects on user-orientated cross-language search. In total six groups participated in iCLEF with different approaches, ranging from pure log analysis to specific experiment designs using the Flickling interface