Realizing a Portal Site for Conceptual Information Retrieval That can Treat Texts and Images in a Unified Way

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The research aim is to realize a new image retrieval model that can receive a keyword query, as is seen in usual document retrieval, and output the ranked images according to the degrees of the conceptual relatedness to the query. This has been done by settling an image retrieval portal site between users and a commercial Web image search engine.The images in the WWW are often indexed by inappropriate and insufficient keywords. According to our model, users are asked to cooperatively annotate the images that they have decided being relevant, and the annotated images are stored in the portal site to raise the effectiveness of the successive retrieval. As to the image annotation we have proposed an idea of assisting users by showing one of the four image types to which an image belongs and a fill-in-form with four slots in which users are requested to input the seemingly appropriate keywords for the image. Some inappropriate keywords may be occasionally given and then will be filtered out by the proposed conceptual filtering routine. The effects of the conceptual filtering was experimentally examined in comparison with a simple frequency based method on a set of 1,000 images drown via Google image search engine.In order to realize a real image retrieval portal site, a mechanism of conceptually matching the query keywords with the image keywords as well as a mechanism of cooperatively working the portal site with a commercial search engine should be formalized. The conceptual matching routine has been programmed and fully examined in a viewpoint of retrieval effectiveness. As to the corporation, our model can work with Excite, Yahoo! and Goo image search engines.