User interactions with multimedia repositories using natural language interfaces - OntoNL: An architectural framework and its implementation

We present a generalized architectural framework for constructing and using natural language interfaces for interactions with multimedia repositories. The system allows the users to specify natural language queries about the multimedia content with rich semantics. It uses an extensive set of methodologies and tools for linguistic processing, and utilizes the MPEG-7 and the domain ontologies to reduce the ambiguities in the natural language and to rank the results. We describe the implementation of this framework for supporting interactions with a multimedia repository, described with the MPEG-7 MDS (Multimedia Description Schemes) structures, that also uses User Profile information for better ranking of the result queries.