MIRACLE at VideoCLEF 2008: Classification of Multilingual Speech Transcripts

This paper describes the participation of MIRACLE research consortium at the VideoCLEF track at CLEF 2008. We took part in both the main mandatory Classification task that consists in classifying videos of television episodes using speech transcripts and metadata, and the Keyframe Extraction task, whose objective is to select keyframes that represent individual episodes from a set of supplied keyframes (one from each shot of the video source). For the first task, our system is composed of two main blocks, the first in charge of building the core system knowledge base, and then the set of operational elements that are needed to classify the speech transcripts of the topic episodes and generate the output in RSS format. For the second task, our approach is based on the assumption that the most representative fragment (shot) of each episode is the one whose distance to the whole episode is the lowest, considering a vector space model. 4 runs were submitted in all. Regarding the classification task, we ranked 3 (out of 6 participants) in terms of precision and 2 in terms of recall.