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On the use of commonsense ontology for multimedia event recounting

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Abstract

Textually narrating the observed evidences relevant to the reasons why a video clip is being retrieved for an event is still a highly challenging problem. This paper explores the use of a commonsense ontology, namely ConceptNet, in generating short descriptions for recounting the audio–visual evidences. The ontology is exploited as a knowledge engine to provide event–relevant common sense, which is expressed in terms of concepts and their relationships, for semantics understanding, context-based concept screening and sentence synthesis. A principal way of exploiting the ontology, from extracting the event–relevant semantic network to the formation of syntactic parse trees, is outlined and discussed. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets (TRECVID MED and MediaEval) show the effectiveness of our approach. The findings show insights on the usability of common sense for multimedia search, including the feasibility of inferring relevant concepts for event detection, as well as the quality of textual sentences in meeting human expectation.

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Notes

  1. https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html.

  2. Refer to http://vireo.cs.cityu.edu.hk/mer_demo/networks.html for twenty event networks generated for TRECVID MED 2012.

  3. -ing and -s are omitted in ConceptNet.

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Correspondence to Chun-Chet Tan.

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The work described in this paper was fully supported by a Grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CityU 120213).

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Tan, CC., Ngo, CW. On the use of commonsense ontology for multimedia event recounting. Int J Multimed Info Retr 5, 73–88 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13735-015-0090-3

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