Project

Common-Sense and Semantic Understanding for ARIA

ARIA (Annotation and Retrieval Integration Agent) is a software agent that acts as an assistant to a user writing email or Web pages. As the user types a story, it does continuous retrieval and ranking on a photo database. It can use descriptions in the story text to semi-automatically annotate pictures based on how they are used. This project is improving ARIA's automatic annotation capabilities through world-aware semantic understanding of the text; making photo retrieval more robust by using Open Mind Common Sense to make semantic connections between the story text and annotations; and learning personal common sense through the text that can then be used to improve photo retrieval by enabling personalized semantic connections.