Forschungsberichte der Technischen Fakultät Abteilung Informationstechnik Fuzzy Quantifiers for Processing Natural Language Queries in Content - Based Multimedia

The processing of natural language (NL) queries and the search for semantic matches between such queries and the contents of multimedia documents necessitate powerful quantifiers that adequately model quantifying expressions in NL. In this report, we develop an axiomatic theory of fuzzy NL quantifiers and present a model of this theory which makes its systematical interpretation possible. The need for such a theory arises from the fact that the meaning of a natural language query depends heavily not only on the concepts it contains, but also on the various quantifying expressions interrelating these concepts in the query, which are often fuzzy in nature. The resulting operators form a class of generic operators for information aggregation and the fusion of gradual evaluations, which could also prove useful in more traditional retrieval systems. We conclude the report by sketching some applications of the theory to our multimedia retrieval system and give an example of how it is used for the content-based retrieval of meteorological documents.1