Retrieval of multimedia stimuli with semantic and emotional cues: Suggestions from a controlled study
This addresses the need for improved multimedia retrieval in Human-Computer Interaction, though it is incremental as it evaluates existing manual methods rather than proposing new automated solutions.
The study tackled the problem of efficiently retrieving pictures using semantic and emotional annotations, finding that emotional annotations suffice for fast retrieval in small databases despite lower accuracy, while semantic annotations are necessary for larger datasets but slow the initial search.
The ability to efficiently search pictures with annotated semantics and emotion is an important problem for Human-Computer Interaction with considerable interdisciplinary significance. Accuracy and speed of the multimedia retrieval process depends on the chosen metadata annotation model. The quality of such multifaceted retrieval is opposed to the potential complexity of data setup procedures and development of multimedia annotations. Additionally, a recent study has shown that databases of emotionally annotated multimedia are still being predominately searched manually which highlights the need to study this retrieval modality. To this regard we present a study with N = 75 participants aimed to evaluate the influence of keywords and dimensional emotions in manual retrieval of pictures. The study showed that if the multimedia database is comparatively small emotional annotations are sufficient to achieve a fast retrieval despite comparatively lesser overall accuracy. In a larger dataset semantic annotations became necessary for efficient retrieval although they contributed to a slower beginning of the search process. The experiment was performed in a controlled environment with a team of psychology experts. The results were statistically consistent with validates measures of the participants' perceptual speed.