Improving automatic semantic annotations of news videos in Turkish through Web alignment and event extraction

Video texts - if available - constitute a valuable source for automatic semantic annotation of large video archives. In this paper, we present our attempts towards the improvement of a text-based semantic annotation and retrieval system for Turkish news videos through automatic Web alignment and event extraction. The results of our initial experiments turn out to be promising and these two features are incorporated into the existing system. Although the ideas of automatic Web alignment and text-based event extraction are not the novel contributions of the current paper, to the best of our knowledge, their first implementation and employment in a system for Turkish news videos is a significant contribution to related work on videos in lesser studied languages such as Turkish. Also overviewed in the current paper is the prospective version of the system encompassing components for several other tasks including topic segmentation, keyphrase extraction, news categorization and summarization to enhance the overall system.