Anton Nijholt Rieks Op Den Akker

Our interest in the computer processing of football commentary was at first given in by the EU/IST funded project MUMIS (Multimedia Indexing and Searching) that started in 2000 [11, 18, 19]. This project's objective is to develop technology for automatic indexing of multimedia programme material (texts, news streams, speech transcripts) and to develop a user interface that supports the conceptual querying and browsing of related video content over the internet. One of the innovative features of MUMIS is that it aims at the disclosure of video archives by applying information extraction techniques, originally developed for the textual domain. Information extraction is a technique that is typically suited for content in specific domains. In MUMIS the extraction technology is applied to the domain of football. The project requires the integration of lexicons, ontology and information extraction tools for this domain, and the development of merging algorithms to integrate the (incomplete) information coming from different sources. For example, the information extraction components should be able to extract some thirty different event types, using methods such as part of speech tagging, syntactic parsing, semantic tagging, and discourse analysis Typical football events to be detected are: kick-off, penalty, goal, halftime, free-kick, etc. The user interface should help users to formulate queries that can be matched on the annotations generated by the extraction component and linked to the time-codes of the corresponding video fragments. In parallel to the MUMIS project we surveyed a number of research efforts that deal all with football commentary but for which the technology focus differs: retrieval, interpretation or generation of commentary and related (but not necessarily language oriented) research. There were two reasons for this investigation. One obvious reason is to find out how the new technology and tools can be adapted to similar applications. The other is to see how the domain knowledge obtained for extraction purposes can be employed for other intelligent applications in the same domain. Since at the same time several of our M.Sc. students got interested in learning multi-agent systems for developing teams for the RoboCup leagues we decided to stick close to the football domain in this survey as well. In this paper we start with the survey of the domain specific research. The aim of the survey was to obtain a comprehensive view of the field could guide the selection of new research themes. In the second part of the paper we give a short introduction to the MUMIS project as it can be embedded in the general football related language technology research.