Multimedia Search Without Visual Analysis: The Value of Linguistic and Contextual Information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other nonimage aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features