Natural language navigation in multimedia archives: an integrated approach

The paper presents the design and prototypical implementation of an integrated retrieval system (HPQS) which provides natural language access to multimedia documents in restricted topic areas. It supports new flexible ways of querying by combining a semantically rich retrieval model based on fuzzy set theory with domain-specific methods for document analysis which can be applied online (i.e. the search criteria are not restricted to combinations of anticipated descriptors). Emphasis is put on the retrieval methodology and on the interplay of the system components: because of its provision of computationally demanding direct search methods, it is crucial to the system that all components cooperate to ensure acceptable response times.