Adaptive Linking between Text and Photos Using Common Sense Reasoning

In a hypermedia authoring task, an author often wants to set up meaningful connections between different media, such as text and photographs. To facilitate this task, it is helpful to have a software agent dynamically adapt the presentation of a media database to the user's authoring activities, and look for opportunities for annotation and retrieval. However, potential connections are often missed because of differences in vocabulary or semantic connections that are "obvious" to people but that might not be explicit. ARIA (Annotation and Retrieval Integration Agent) is a software agent that acts an assistant to a user writing e-mail or Web pages. As the user types a story, it does continuous retrieval and ranking on a photo database. It can use descriptions in the story to semiautomatically annotate pictures. To improve the associations beyond simple keyword matching, we use natural language parsing techniques to extract important roles played by text, such as "who, what, where, when". Since many of the photos depict common everyday situations such as weddings or recitals, we use a common sense knowledge base, Open Mind, to fill in semantic gaps that might otherwise prevent successful associations.