Incremental Acquisition of Conceptual Indices for
Multimedia Design Documentation. Catherine Baudin, Barney Pell, and
Smadar Kedar. Appears in Proceedings of the AAAI-94 Workshop on Indexing and
Reuse in Multimedia Systems, Seattle, 1994.
ABSTRACT
Information retrieval systems based on conceptual indexing can access the
underlying meaning of text, graphics or videotaped documents. Since
conceptual indices represent the semantics of a piece of information, it is
difficult to extract them automatically from a document, and it is tedious
to build them manually. We present a method to acquire and refine
conceptual indices in the context of Dedal, a system that facilitates the
indexing and retrieval of text, graphics and videotaped design documents in
the mechanical engineering domain. Our approach is to use an underlying
model of the domain covered by the documents to constrain the user's
queries. This facilitates question-based acquisition of conceptual indices:
converting user queries into indices which accurately model the content of
the documents, and can be reused. We demonstrate the relevance and coverage
of the acquired indices through experimentation.