Sentences vs. phrases: syntactic complexity in multimedia information retrieval

  • Authors:
  • Sharon Flank

  • Affiliations:
  • eMotion, Inc., Vienna, VA

  • Venue:
  • NLPComplexity '00 NAACL-ANLP 2000 Workshop: Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

In experiments on a natural language information retrieval system that retrieves images based on textual captions, we show that syntactic complexity actually aids retrieval. We compare two types of captioned images, those characterized with full sentences in English, and those characterized by lists of words and phrases. The full-sentence captions show a 15% increase in retrieval accuracy over the word-list captions. We conclude that the syntactic complexity may be of use in fact because it decreases semantic ambiguity: the word-list captions may be syntactically simple, but they are semantically confusingly complex.