Automatically generating multilingual, semantically enhanced, descriptions of digital audio and video objects on the Web

Every day, millions of new images, videos and audios are uploaded to the web. However, unlike text-based content, audio and video objects cannot be indexed by search engines. Thus, much valuable multimedia content stay unreachable for a great majority of online users. To overcome this problem we introduce a technique that automatically generates semantically enhanced descriptions of audio and video objects. The goal is to facilitate indexing and retrieval of the objects with the help of traditional search engines. Basically, the technique automatically generates static Web pages that describe the content of the digital audio and video objects, organized in such a way as to facilitate locating segments of the audio or video that correspond to the descriptions. The technique is a mashup of Web services that also provides translation of the descriptions and semantic enhancement. We thoroughly analyzed the click-data comparing accesses to the digital content before and after the automatic generation of the descriptions. The outcomes suggest that the technique significantly improve the retrieval of items, not only in terms of visibility, but also brings down language barriers, by supporting multilingual access.