DCU Search Runs at MediaEval 2014 Search and Hyperlinking

We described Dublin City University (DCU)’s participation in the Search sub-task of the Search and Hyperlinking Task at MediaEval 2014. Exploratory experiments were carried out to investigate the utility of prosodic prominence features in the task of retrieving relevant video segments from a collection of BBC videos. Normalised acoustic correlates of loudness, pitch, and duration were incorporated in a standard TF-IDF weighting scheme to increase weights for terms that were prominent in speech. Prosodic models outperformed a text-based TF-IDF baseline on the training set but failed to surpass the baseline on the test set.