Language-based multimedia information retrieval

This paper describes various methods and approaches for language-based multimedia information retrieval, which have been developed in the projects POP-EYE and OLIVE and which will be developed further in the MUMIS project. All of these project aim at supporting automated indexing of video material by use of human language technologies. Thus, in contrast to image or sound-based retrieval methods, where both the query language and the indexing methods build on non-linguistic data, these methods attempt to exploit advanced text retrieval technologies for the retrieval of non-textual material. While POP-EYE was building on subtitles or captions as the prime language key for disclosing video fragments, OLIVE is making use of speech recognition to automatically derive transcriptions of the sound tracks, generating time-coded linguistic elements which then serve as the basis for text-based retrieval functionality

Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Portable extraction of partially structured facts from the web

A novel fact extraction task is defined to fill a gap between current information retrieval and information extraction technologies. It is shown that it is possible to extract useful partially structured facts about different kinds of entities in a broad domain, i.e. all kinds of places depicted in tourist images. Importantly the approach does not rely on existing linguistic resources (gazetteers, taggers, parsers, etc.) and it ported easily and cheaply between two very different languages (English and Latvian). Previous fact extraction from the web has focused on the extraction of structured data, e.g. (Building-LocatedIn-Town). In contrast we extract richer and more interesting facts, such as a fact explaining why a building was built. Enough structure is maintained to facilitate subsequent processing of the information. For example, this partial structure enables straightforward template-based text generation. We report positive results for the correctness and interest of English and Latvian facts and for the utility of the extracted facts in enhancing image captions

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features