Social Font Search by Multimodal Feature Embedding

A typical tag/keyword-based search system retrieves documents where, given a query term q, the query term q occurs in the dataset. However, when applying these systems to a real-world font web community setting, practical challenges arise --- font tags are more subjective than other benchmark datasets, which magnify the tag mismatch problem. To address these challenges, we propose a tag dictionary space leveraged by word embedding, which relates undefined words that have a similar meaning. Even if a query is not defined in the tag dictionary, we can represent it as a vector on the tag dictionary space. The proposed system facilitates multi-modal inputs that can use both textual and image queries. By integrating a visual sentiment concept model that classifies affective concepts as adjective--noun pairs for a given image and uses it as a query, users can interact with the search system in a multi-modal way. We used crowd sourcing to collect user ratings for the retrieved fonts and observed that the retrieved font with the proposed methods obtained a higher score compared to other methods.