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

Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model in Detecting Activities of Daily Living in Wearable Videos for Studies of Dementia

International audienceThis paper presents a method for indexing activities of daily living in videos obtained from wearable cameras. In the context of dementia diagnosis by doctors, the videos are recorded at patients' houses and later visualized by the medical practitioners. The videos may last up to two hours, therefore a tool for an efficient navigation in terms of activities of interest is crucial for the doctors. The specific recording mode provides video data which are really difficult, being a single sequence shot where strong motion and sharp lighting changes often appear. Our work introduces an automatic motion based segmentation of the video and a video structuring approach in terms of activities by a hierarchical two-level Hidden Markov Model. We define our description space over motion and visual characteristics of video and audio channels. Experiments on real data obtained from the recording at home of several patients show the difficulty of the task and the promising results of our approach

Artificial Intelligence methodologies to early predict student outcome and enrich learning material

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Metadiscourse Tagging in Academic Lectures

This thesis presents a study into the nature and structure of academic lectures, with a special focus on metadiscourse phenomena. Metadiscourse refers to a set of linguistics expressions that signal specific discourse functions such as the Introduction: “Today we will talk about...” and Emphasising: “This is an important point”. These functions are important because they are part of lecturers’ strategies in understanding of what happens in a lecture. The knowledge of their presence and identity could serve as initial steps toward downstream applications that will require functional analysis of lecture content such as a browser for lectures archives, summarisation, or an automatic minute-taker for lectures. One challenging aspect for metadiscourse detection and classification is that the set of expressions are semi-fixed, meaning that different phrases can indicate the same function. To that end a four-stage approach is developed to study metadiscourse in academic lectures. Firstly, a corpus of metadiscourse for academic lectures from Physics and Economics courses is built by adapting an existing scheme that describes functional-oriented metadiscourse categories. Second, because producing reference transcripts is a time-consuming task and prone to some errors due to the manual efforts required, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is built specifically to produce transcripts of lectures. Since the reference transcripts lack time-stamp information, an alignment system is applied to the reference to be able to evaluate the ASR system. Then, a model is developed using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to classify metadiscourse tags using both textual and acoustical features. The results show that n-grams are the most inductive features for the task; however, due to data sparsity the model does not generalise for unseen n-grams. This limits its ability to solve the variation issue in metadiscourse expressions. Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) provide a promising solution as this can capture both the syntactic and semantic similarities between words and thus is able to solve the generalisation issue. However, CBOW ignores the word order completely, something which is very important to be retained when classifying metadiscourse tags. The final stage aims to address the issue of sequence modelling by developing a joint CBOW and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. CNNs can work with continuous features such as word embedding in an elegant and robust fashion by producing a fixed-size feature vector that is able to identify indicative local information for the tagging task. The results show that metadiscourse tagging using CNNs outperforms the SVMs model significantly even on ASR outputs, owing to its ability to predict a sequence of words that is more representative for the task regardless of its position in the sentence. In addition, the inclusion of other features such as part-of-speech (POS) tags and prosodic cues improved the results further. These findings are consistent in both disciplines. The final contribution in this thesis is to investigate the suitability of using metadiscourse tags as discourse features in the lecture structure segmentation model, despite the fact that the task is approached as a classification model and most of the state-of-art models are unsupervised. In general, the obtained results show remarkable improvements over the state-of-the-art models in both disciplines