Investigating the document structure as a source of evidence for multimedia fragment retrieval

International audienceMultimedia objects can be retrieved using their context that can be for instance the text surrounding them in documents. This text may be either near or far from the searched objects. Our goal in this paper is to study the impact, in term of effectiveness, of text position relatively to searched objects. The multimedia objects we consider are described in structured documents such as XML ones. The document structure is therefore exploited to provide this text position in documents. Although structural information has been shown to be an effective source of evidence in textual information retrieval, only a few works investigated its interest in multimedia retrieval. More precisely, the task we are interested in this paper is to retrieve multimedia fragments (i.e. XML elements having at least one multimedia object). Our general approach is built on two steps: we first retrieve XML elements containing multimedia objects, and we then explore the surrounding information to retrieve relevant multimedia fragments. In both cases, we study the impact of the surrounding information using the documents structure.Our work is carried out on images, but it can be extended to any other media, since the physical content of multimedia objects is not used. We conducted several experiments in the context of the Multimedia track of the INEX evaluation campaign. Results showed that structural evidences are of high interest to tune the importance of textual context for multimedia retrieval. Moreover, the proposed approach outperforms state of the art approaches

Combining Concept- with Content-based Multimedia Retrieval

The arrival of the XML standard opened new doors for structured document search. Common approach in XML retrieval is to directly exploit the documents structure. However this is likely to fail for two reasons. First of all, it neglects the rich multimedia character of documents on the Internet, where a wide variety of multimedia objects can be found such as text, images and streaming video. Secondly, using the document structure as the basis for searching the content of a document can easily lead to semantical misinterpretation of the document's content. This chapter discusses an approach for searching rich multimedia document collections, that tackles these two problems using a combination of conceptual search and content-based retrieval

A multi-layered Bayesian network model for structured document retrieval

New standards in document representation, like for example SGML, XML, and MPEG-7, compel Information Retrieval to design and implement models and tools to index, retrieve and present documents according to the given document structure. The paper presents the design of an Information Retrieval system for multimedia structured documents, like for example journal articles, e-books, and MPEG-7 videos. The system is based on Bayesian Networks, since this class of mathematical models enable to represent and quantify the relations between the structural components of the document. Some preliminary results on the system implementation are also presented

A multi-layered Bayesian network model for structured document retrieval

New standards in document representation, like for example SGML, XML, and MPEG-7, compel Information Retrieval to design and implement models and tools to index, retrieve and present documents according to the given document structure. The paper presents the design of an Information Retrieval system for multimedia structured documents, like for example journal articles, e-books, and MPEG-7 videos. The system is based on Bayesian Networks, since this class of mathematical models enable to represent and quantify the relations between the structural components of the document. Some preliminary results on the system implementation are also presented

Evaluation of effective XML information retrieval

XML is being adopted as a common storage format in scientific data repositories, digital libraries, and on the World Wide Web. Accordingly, there is a need for content-oriented XML retrieval systems that can efficiently and effectively store, search and retrieve information from XML document collections. Unlike traditional information retrieval systems where whole documents are usually indexed and retrieved as information units, XML retrieval systems typically index and retrieve document components of varying granularity. To evaluate the effectiveness of such systems, test collections where relevance assessments are provided according to an XML-specific definition of relevance are necessary. Such test collections have been built during four rounds of the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX). There are many different approaches to XML retrieval; most approaches either extend full-text information retrieval systems to handle XML retrieval, or use database technologies that incorporate existing XML standards to handle both XML presentation and retrieval. We present a hybrid approach to XML retrieval that combines text information retrieval features with XML-specific features found in a native XML database. Results from our experiments on the INEX 2003 and 2004 test collections demonstrate the usefulness of applying our hybrid approach to different XML retrieval tasks. A realistic definition of relevance is necessary for meaningful comparison of alternative XML retrieval approaches. The three relevance definitions used by INEX since 2002 comprise two relevance dimensions, each based on topical relevance. We perform an extensive analysis of the two INEX 2004 and 2005 relevance definitions, and show that assessors and users find them difficult to understand. We propose a new definition of relevance for XML retrieval, and demonstrate that a relevance scale based on this definition is useful for XML retrieval experiments. Finding the appropriate approach to evaluate XML retrieval effectiveness is the subject of ongoing debate within the XML information retrieval research community. We present an overview of the evaluation methodologies implemented in the current INEX metrics, which reveals that the metrics follow different assumptions and measure different XML retrieval behaviours. We propose a new evaluation metric for XML retrieval and conduct an extensive analysis of the retrieval performance of simulated runs to show what is measured. We compare the evaluation behaviour obtained with the new metric to the behaviours obtained with two of the official INEX 2005 metrics, and demonstrate that the new metric can be used to reliably evaluate XML retrieval effectiveness. To analyse the effectiveness of XML retrieval in different application scenarios, we use evaluation measures in our new metric to investigate the behaviour of XML retrieval approaches under the following two scenarios: the ad-hoc retrieval scenario, exploring the activities carried out as part of the INEX 2005 Ad-hoc track; and the multimedia retrieval scenario, exploring the activities carried out as part of the INEX 2005 Multimedia track. For both application scenarios we show that, although different values for retrieval parameters are needed to achieve the optimal performance, the desired textual or multimedia information can be effectively located using a combination of XML retrieval approaches

Recent development in XML-IR

The Web is characterized by a huge amount of heterogeneous data sources, which have different media support and format representation. Because XML can represent files of different formats, it can play an important role in IR since it is becoming a standard form for data representation and exchange over the Web. Under this assumption, the problem of querying heterogeneous sources can be reduced to the problem of querying XML data sources. This paper shows the influence of XML on the IR techniques and methodologies during the last five years through serving over 400 papers published in different conferences and journals

Realization of Semantic Atom Blog

Web blog is used as a collaborative platform to publish and share information. The information accumulated in the blog intrinsically contains the knowledge. The knowledge shared by the community of people has intangible value proposition. The blog is viewed as a multimedia information resource available on the Internet. In a blog, information in the form of text, image, audio and video builds up exponentially. The multimedia information contained in an Atom blog does not have the capability, which is required by the software processes so that Atom blog content can be accessed, processed and reused over the Internet. This shortcoming is addressed by exploring OWL knowledge modeling, semantic annotation and semantic categorization techniques in an Atom blog sphere. By adopting these techniques, futuristic Atom blogs can be created and deployed over the Internet

Multilingual search for cultural heritage archives via combining multiple translation resources

The linguistic features of material in Cultural Heritage (CH) archives may be in various languages requiring a facility for effective multilingual search. The specialised language often associated with CH content introduces problems for automatic translation to support search applications. The MultiMatch project is focused on enabling users to interact with CH content across different media types and languages. We present results from a MultiMatch study exploring various translation techniques for the CH domain. Our experiments examine translation techniques for the English language CLEF 2006 Cross-Language Speech Retrieval (CL-SR) task using Spanish, French and German queries. Results compare effectiveness of our query translation against a monolingual baseline and show improvement when combining a domain-specific translation lexicon with a standard machine translation system