Multilingual Semantic Linking for Video Streams: Making “Ideas Worth Sharing” More Accessible

This paper describes our submission to the Developers Challenge at WoLE2013, “Doing Good by Linking Entities.” We present a fully automatic system which provides intelligent suggestions in the form of links to Wikipedia articles for video streams in multiple languages, based on the subtitles that accompany the visual content. The system is applied to online conference talks. In particular, we adapt a recently proposed semantic linking approach for streams of television broadcasts to facilitate generating contextual links while a TED talk is being viewed. TED is a highly popular global conference series covering many research domains; the publicly available talks have accumulated a total view count of over one billion at the time of writing. We exploit the multilinguality of Wikipedia and the TED subtitles to provide contextual suggestions in the language of the user watching a video. In this way, a vast source of educational and intellectual content is disclosed to a broad audience that might otherwise experience difficulties interpreting it.