Accessing multimedia through concept clustering

Abstract

Multimedia information retrieval is a challenging problem because multimedia information is not inherently structured. Jabber is an experimental system that attempts to bring some structure to this task. Jabber allows users to retrieve records of videoconferences based upon the concepts discussed. In this paper we introduce ConceptFinder, a sub-system within Jabber, and show how it is able to process the spoken text of a meeting into meeting topics. ConceptFinder can make subtle distinctions among different senses of the same words, and is able to summarize a set of related words, giving a name to each topic. Users can then use this name to query or browse the stored multimedia, through Jabber's user interface. By presenting information that closely matches a user's expectations, the challenge of multimedia retrieval is rendered more tractable.