Corinne Jörgensen

Attributes of images in describing tasks

Abstract With the current rapid expansion in imaging technologies, access to collections of images is a subject of major interest. This exploratory research investigated image attributes typically noted by participants in a series of describing tasks involving activities such as viewing images, describing them for a retrieval system, and describing them from memory. Content analysis and descriptive statistics were used to characterize textual statements generated by participants; this analysis produced forty-seven image attributes which were grouped conceptually into twelve higher level classes of attributes. The data suggest that access to a wide range of attributes is needed to address all facets of interest to those using pictorial images. They further suggest that certain classes of attributes may appear more frequently in a set of tasks relating to the description of images, including literal objects, the human form and associated attributes, and color and location terms, More unexpectedly, terms describing the ‘story’ within the image also appeared frequently in this research. The disjunction between these results and those attributes typically addressed in traditional image indexing systems suggest revisiting assumptions upon which image indexing and retrieval systems are being created.

Image querying by image professionals

This article reports the analysis of two samples of search logs from a commercial image provider over a 1-month period. The study analyzes image searches and queries, user query modification strategies, and user browsing and downloading of results. Unique term searches are less frequent than earlier research has shown; descriptive and thematic queries are more common. Boolean searching, although heavily employed, appears to be ineffective and leads to query modifications. Although there was a large amount of query modification (61.7% of queries across the two samples), the tactics overall do not appear to be carefully thought out and seem to be largely experimental. Given the willingness to modify queries but the inability to do so in an effective way, more support for query modification may be beneficial.

The impact of the internet on public library use: an analysis of the current consumer market for library and internet services

The potential impact of the Internet on the publics demand for the services and resources of public libraries is an issue of critical importance. The research reported in this article provides baseline data concerning the evolving relationship between the publics use of the library and its use of the Internet. The authors developed a consumer model of the American adult market for information services and resources, segmented by use (or nonuse) of the public library and by access (or lack of access) to, and use (or nonuse) of, the Internet. A national Random Digit Dialing telephone survey collected data to estimate the size of each of six market segments, and to describe their usage choices between the public library and the Internet. The analyses presented in this article provide estimates of the size and demographics of each of the market segments; describe why people are currently using the public library and the Internet; identify the decision criteria people use in their choices of which provider to use; identify areas in which libraries and the Internet appear to be competing and areas in which they appear to be complementary; and identify reasons why people choose not to use the public library and/or the Internet. The data suggest that some differentiation between the library and the Internet is taking place, which may very well have an impact on consumer choices between the two. Longitudinal research is necessary to fully reveal trends in these usage choices, which have implications for all types of libraries in planning and policy development.

Semantics of multimedia in MPEG-7

In this paper, we present the tools standardized by MPEG-7 for describing the semantics of multimedia. In particular, we focus on the abstraction model, entities, attributes and relations of MPEG-7 semantic descriptions. MPEG-7 tools can describe the semantics of specific instances of multimedia such as one image or one video segment but can also generalize these descriptions either to multiple instances of multimedia or to a set of semantic descriptions. The key components of MPEG-7 semantic descriptions are semantic entities such as objects and events, attributes of these entities such as labels and properties, and, finally, relations of these entities such as an object being the patient of an event. The descriptive power and usability of these tools has been demonstrated in numerous experiments and applications, these make them key candidates to enable intelligent applications that deal with multimedia at human levels.

Access to Pictorial Material: A Review of Current Research and Future Prospects

Rapid expansion in the digitization of image and image collections has vastly increased the numbers of images available to scholars and researchers through electronic means. This research review will familiarize the reader with current research applicable to the development of image retrieval systems and provides additional material for exploring the topic further, both in print and online. The discussion will cover several broad areas, among them classification and indexing systems used for describing image collections and research initiatives into image access focusing on image attributes, users, queries, tasks, and cognitive aspects of searching. Prospects for the future of image access, including an outline of future research initiatives, are discussed. Further research in each of these areas will provide basic data which will inform and enrich image access system design and will hopefully provide a richer, more flexible, and satisfactory environment for searching for and discovering images. Harnessing the true power of the digital image environment will only be possible when image retrieval systems are coherently designed from principles derived from the fullest range of applicable disciplines, rather than from isolated or fragmented perspectives.

Member activities and quality of tags in a collection of historical photographs in Flickr

A huge number of informal messages are posted every day in social network sites, blogs, and discussion forums. Emotions seem to be frequently important in these texts for expressing friendship, showing social support or as part of online arguments. Algorithms to identify sentiment and sentiment strength are needed to help understand the role of emotion in this informal communication and also to identify inappropriate or anomalous affective utterances, potentially associated with threatening behavior to the self or others. Nevertheless, existing sentiment detection algorithms tend to be commercially oriented, designed to identify opinions about products rather than user behaviors. This article partly fills this gap with a new algorithm, SentiStrength, to extract sentiment strength from informal English text, using new methods to exploit the de facto grammars and spelling styles of cyberspace. Applied to MySpace comments and with a lookup table of term sentiment strengths optimized by machine learning, SentiStrength is able to predict positive emotion with 60.6p accuracy and negative emotion with 72.8p accuracy, both based upon strength scales of 1–5. The former, but not the latter, is better than baseline and a wide range of general machine learning approaches.

Partnerships and Collaboration among Public Libraries, Public Broadcast Media, and Museums: Current Context and Future Potential

This article reports one part of a project that examined collaborations among public institutions providing informal lifelong learning opportunities to children and adults in the United States. It presents the results of a survey of chief executive officers and staff of public libraries, museums, public television stations, and public radio stations that investigated the extent and nature of collaborations between and among these institutions and forces driving or preventing collaboration. There are some potentially interesting asymmetries in the responses among organizations, suggesting that enhanced awareness among these institutions of institution‐specific types of resources can allow such institutions to partner and build on each other’s strengths and skills.

A sublanguage approach to natural language processing for an expert system

Abstract A sublanguage grammar approach with strong reliance on semantic word classes was used to develop an NLP component for processing the free-text comments on life insurance applications for evaluation by an underwriting expert system. The NLP component is implemented using a logic-programming formalism. Lexicon entries contain semantic word class tags such as BODYPART, SYMPTOM, or MEDICATION. Adjacency Rules and an Ambiguity Filter are used to interpret the input data using these semantic word classes. Across two experiments, the system produced appropriate readings for 96.8% of a sample of 2069 utterances, and the number of parses produced per utterance was 1.079 for the same sample. Misspellings caused the system its only serious problem. The sublanguage approach to processing text was shown to be very promising for expert systems and suggests itself as a useful paradigm for a range of other text-based systems which must deal with naturally occurring and frequently ungrammatical texts.

Image attributes: A study of scientific diagrams

In recent years, advancements in imaging technology have fostered a dramatic increase in user access to digital images. In accordance with this trend, greater emphasis has been placed on efforts to develop adequate indexing and retrieval methods for image databases. However, lacking a detailed basis upon which to derive such methods, relevant efforts are often developed based upon an inconsistent set of general theories and assumptions regarding user needs and search strategies. Citing the realistic need for an empirical basis to address these issues, recent efforts have focused upon human subject testing as a means to ascertain the general attributes humans use when describing certain images. The following paper details the preliminary results of a relevant effort to explore the attributes naive subjects use to describe scientific diagrams. Results of this investigation are intended to expand the current subset of images explored through this methodological approach, as well as explore the importance of certain image attributes across different types of visual representations.

Seizing the day : A case study of one school's core curriculum revision process

This article presents an overview of how one school utilized recent research results as input to a systematic planning process for curriculum revision. The curriculum planning used a process model incorporating principles of instructional systems design combined with a literature review, data, and results of the ALISE 1994 Research Grant Award Project. The authors describe the core curriculum review process; the development and content of a new information technology core course and its relationship to the curriculum as a whole; procedures for the courses implementation, including resources and constraints; and suggestions for evaluation of the course.