Lynda Hardman, CWI Amsterdam
Wed 08 Apr 2015, 16:00 - 17:00
Informatics Forum (IF-4.31/4.33)

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Suzanne Perry (sperry)

People have been communicating through stories and narratives since before the emergence of written historical records.  Narrative continues to form the basis of modern forms of video-based communication, such as feature films, documentaries and news items.

In the digital age, video search engines retrieve and present video clips as a ranked list. The viewer is forced to deduce the relations among the clips to infer a coherent story from them. This leads to unnecessary cognitive effort that does not directly satisfy the viewer’s information need.

We describe an example system, Vox Populi, which uses a specific discourse structure to create coherent video sequences from richly annotated video clips. In this case using a discourse model of argumentation. Our longer-term goal is to be able to assemble relevant video clips from a wider range of topics in a wider range of discourse structures into a coherent sequence.

We give example discourse models that have been incorporated into (video sequence) generation systems and explain our research vision. What can we achieve in the short term and what are our next steps for getting there?