Multilingual Social Tagging of Art Images: Cultural Bridges and Diversity
Brief overview of the "T3 project: Test, Tags, and Trust" at the University of Maryland, which combines text mining and social tags for improving access to digital image collections in museums and libraries. The principal investigators of this project are Drs. Judith Klavans (Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab) and Jennifer Golbeck (iSchool Human-Computer Interaction Lab). Within this broader context, the talk will focus on a study of multilingual social tagging, carried out by Irene Eleta with the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Golbeck. This study compares social tagging patterns in two languages (Spanish and English) in image collections of art. Also, it proposes ways to leverage multilingual tags for enriching the images metadata, adding diversity, and improving access in different languages. Recently, this work was accepted in the International ACM Conference CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work), to be held in February, 2012.
Irene Eleta is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, with Fulbright sponsorship. Access to multilingual information is the overarching motivation for her research and professional career; with experience as a professional translator and in the evaluation of machine translation systems, she became interested in multilingual and cross-language search during her master studies a the University of Sheffield (UK). Her recent work includes multilingual social tagging, and multilingual communication in Twitter. Irene comes from Spain, has lived in four countries, and speaks Spanish, English and French.
