Nicola Orio

Evaluation of Input Devices for Musical Expression: Borrowing Tools from HCI

This paper reviews the existing literature on input device evaluation and design in human-computer interaction (HCI) and discusses possible applications of this knowledge to the design and evaluation of new interfaces for musical expression. Specifically, a set of musical tasks is suggested to allow the evaluation of different existing controllers.

A novel method for stemmer generation based on hidden markov models

In this paper, we present a method based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to generate statistical stemmers. Using a list of words as training set, the method estimates the HMM parameters which are used to calculate the most probable stem for an arbitrary word. Stemming is performed by computing the most probable path, through the HMM states, corresponding to the input word. Linguistic knowledge or a training set of manually stemmed words are not required. We describe the method and the results of the experiments carried out using standard test collections for five different languages.

IPSA: A Digital Archive of Herbals to Support Scientific Research

The work reported in this paper has been carried out in the context of a multidisciplinary project, named Ipsa, which has been launched at the University of Padua in 2002. Aim of the project is the design and the construction of a digital library of drawings and illustrations of historic documents, where the digital library is constructed for use of researchers of art and history of scientific illustration. This paper presents the first results of the ongoing project on the development of the digital archive of herbals, that are manuscripts containing hand drawings of real plants. The paper has a specific focus on the user requirements analysis, which has been conducted with a user-centred approach. According to user requirements, we designed tools to provide researchers with novel ways of accessing the digital manuscripts and sharing and transferring knowledge in a collaborative environment.

Annotating illuminated manuscripts: an effective tool for research and education

The aim of the paper is to report the research results of an ongoing project that deals with the exploitation of a digital archive of drawings and illustrations of historic documents for research and educational purposes. According to the results on a study of user requirements, we have designed tools to provide researchers with innovative ways for accessing the digital manuscripts, sharing, and transferring knowledge in a collaborative environment. We have found that the results of scientific research on the relationships between images of manuscripts produced over the centuries can be rendered explicit by using annotations. For this purpose, a taxonomy for linking annotation is introduced, together with a conceptual schema which represents annotations and links them to digital objects

Combining melody processing and information retrieval techniques: methodology, evaluation, and system implementation

The article describes the project on music information retrieval that has been carried out at the University of Padova, Italy. The research work has been characterized by the synergy of the modular integration of sound techniques of melody processing and of statistical information retrieval. After illustrating the background from which the project has originated, we describe the complete process, from methodology design through evaluation and system implementation. Conclusions, impacts on research in music information retrieval, and future directions are also described.

The CULTURA project: supporting next generation interaction with digital cultural heritage collections

In recent years there has been a marked uptake in the digitisation of cultural heritage collections. Though this has enabled more sources to be made available to experts and the wider public, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with cultural archives. This is largely due to the monolithic nature of many digital archives; the challenge of understanding large collections, especially if the language is inconsistent; and because users vary in expertise and have different tasks and goals that they are trying to accomplish. This paper describes CULTURA, an FP7 funded project that is addressing these specific issues. The various technologies and approaches being used by CULTURA are discussed, along with the lessons learnt thus far.

A Probabilistic Model to Combine Tags and Acoustic Similarity for Music Retrieval

The rise of the Internet has led the music industry to a transition from physical media to online products and services. As a consequence, current online music collections store millions of songs and are constantly being enriched with new content. This has created a need for music technologies that allow users to interact with these extensive collections efficiently and effectively. Music search and discovery may be carried out using tags, matching user interests and exploiting content-based acoustic similarity. One major issue in music information retrieval is how to combine such noisy and heterogeneous information sources in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. With this aim in mind, the article explores a novel music retrieval framework based on combining tags and acoustic similarity through a probabilistic graph-based representation of a collection of songs. The retrieval function highlights the path across the graph that most likely observes a user query and is used to improve state-of-the-art music search and discovery engines by delivering more relevant ranking lists. Indeed, by means of an empirical evaluation, we show how the proposed approach leads to better performances than retrieval strategies which rank songs according to individual information sources alone or which use a combination of them.

User needs for enhanced engagement with cultural heritage collections

This paper presents research carried out in order to elicit user needs for the design and development of a digital library and research platform intended to enhance user engagement with cultural heritage collections. It outlines a range of user constituencies for this digital library. The paper outlines a taxonomy of intended users for this system and describes in detail the characteristics and requirements of these users for the facilitation and enhancement of their engagement with and use of textual and visual cultural artefacts.

Experiments to Evaluate Probabilistic Models for Automatic Stemmer Generation and Query Word Translation

The paper describes statistical methods and experiments for stemming and for the translation of query words used in the monolingual and bilingual tracks in CLEF 2003. While there is still room for improvement in the method proposed for the bilingual track, the approach adopted for the monolingual track makes it possible to generate stemmers which learn directly how to stem the words in a document from a training word list extracted from the document collection, with no need for language-dependent knowledge. The experiments suggest that statistical approaches to stemming are as effective as classical algorithms which encapsulate predefined linguistic rules.

Alignment of Performances with Scores Aimed at Content-Based Music Access and Retrieval

Music digital libraries pose interesting and challenging research problems, in particular for the development of methodologies and tools for the retrieval of music documents. One difficult aspect of content-based retrieval of musical works is that only scores can be represented by a symbolic notation, while performances, which are of interest for the majority of users, allow for access based on bibliographic values only. The research work reported in this paper proposes to index and retrieve music performances through an automatic alignment of acoustic recordings with the music scores. Alignment my allow for: automatic recognition of performances, aimed at cataloging large collections of recordings; automatic tagging of performances, aimed at an easy access to long recordings. The methodology is based on the use of hidden Markov models, a powerful tool that has been successfully used in many research areas, like speech recognition and molecular biology. The approach has been tested on a collection of acoustic and synthetic performances, showing good results in the recognition and in the tagging of performances. The proposed approach can be used to increase the functionalities of a music digital library, allowing for content-based access to scores and recordings.