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phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de>First Call for Papers - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- S I N N & B E D E U T U N G 1999 4th Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft fuer Semantik Duesseldorf University, Oct. 6 - 8 , 1999 - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Papers are invited from any areas of current research in semantics. Send your abstract of 1000 words/ 2 pages for a 30-minutes talk preferably by email (attachment, .rtf format) to: sub99Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cedar.Buffalo.EDU>ACM SIGIR'99 Post-Conference Workshop on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval Berkeley, CA, August 19, 1999 Call For Participation ___________________________________________________________________________ Background - -------- This workshop is a follow-up to last year's very successful workshop on the same topic. Since the field is advancing so rapidly, it was felt that an annual workshop would be worthwhile. The focus is on the required functionality, techniques, and evaluation criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems. Researchers have been investigating content-based retrieval from non-text sources such as images, audio and video. Initially, the focus of these efforts were on content analysis and retrieval techniques tailored to a specific media; more recently, researchers have started to combine attributes from various media. The goal of multimedia IR systems is to handle general queries such as "find outdoor pictures or video of Clinton and Gore discussing environmental issues". Answering such queries requires intelligent exploitation of both text/speech and visual content. Multimedia IR is a very broad area covering both infrastructure issues (e.g. efficient storage criteria, networking, client-server models) and intelligent content analysis and retrieval. Since this is a one-day workshop, we have chosen three focus areas in the intelligent analysis and retrieval area. About the workshop - ---------------- The first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from various media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large, diverse databases. An example of such a collection would be the WWW. In such cases, a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries, each involving a different indexing scheme. The interaction of various media sources that occur in the same context (e.g., text accompanying pictures, audio accompanying video) is of special interest; such interaction can be exploited in both the content analysis and retrieval phases. The second focus deals with examples of research using content and organization of multimedia information into semantic classes. Users pose and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions. In practice this is difficult to achieve. Building structures that encode semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is extremely difficult. A quick review of computer vision research over the last few years points to this difficulty. In many cases, image content can be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity to retrieve semantically meaningful information. However, it is clear that retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily cannot provide semantically meaningful information. For example, a search for a red flower by color red on a very heterogeneous database cannot be expected to yield meaningful results. On the other hand retrieval of red flowers in a database of flowers can be achieved using color. In context therefore, examples of research using content and organization of multimedia information into semantic classes will be discussed. Many systems, particularly image and video based ones require an example picture which can be used as a query (alternatively, the user may be required to draw a picture). It may be unrealistic to expect an example image to be always available. Thus, it would be useful to find ways of generating new queries. Can NLP techniques be combined with computer vision techniques to generate such queries? Or can multimodal retrieval techniques be combined to create queries suitable for image, video and audio retrieval? In general, a question is how can we create realistic queries for realistic systems. The third focus of this workshop is on evaluation techniques for multimedia retrieval. Currently, most researchers are using the standard evaluation measures defined for text documents; these need to be extended/modified for multimedia documents. There is also a high degree of subjectivity involved that needs to be addressed. Finally, we will also devote one session to discussing MPEG-7 standards and content. By the time of the workshop, the selection committee would have made their choices for standards. We will focus on the following specific topics: - content analysis and retrieval from various media (text, images, video, audio) - interaction of modalities (e.g. text, images) in indexing, retrieval - effective user interfaces (permitting query refinement etc.) - evaluation methodologies for multimedia information. We have found that researchers pay insufficient attention to it. - techniques for relevance ranking - multimodal query formation/decomposition - logic formalisms for multimodal queries - indexing and retrieval from scanned documents - e.g extracting text from images, word spotting - as a retrieval technique for both handwritten and printed documents. - testbeds for evaluating multimodal retrieval: it would be nice to have some resource sharing here since annotating these, and coming up with a good query set are difficult Participation - ----------- Two types of participation are expected. Those interested in making a presentation at this workshop should submit their full papers either in online postscript version or in hardcopy by regular mail to the address given below. The papers should not exceed 5,000 words, including figures, tables, and references. Those interested in participating, but not presenting papers, should submit a statement of interest, not to exceed 500 words. This should clearly state what aspect(s) of the workshop reflect their research interest. These will be used to select panelists. Both types of submissions are due on Friday, June 18th. Decisions will be made no later than Friday, July 2nd. In the case of paper submission, the final camera-ready papers are due on July 23rd. Working notes will be made available to all participants at the workshop. All the submissions should be sent to: Dr. Rohini K. Srihari CEDAR/SUNY at Buffalo UB Commons 520 Lee Entrance, Suite 202 Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583 Email: rohiniMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue