Thursday, October 22, 2009

Well, behind every joke there's some truth

The winner of the ACM MultiMedia Grand Challenge at ACM MultiMedia 2009 was "Joke-O-Mat: Browsing Sitcoms Punchline by Punchline." This application uses speaker diarization and laughter detection to annotate sitcoms and present them to the viewer in an interface that allows presents jokes ranked by laugh reaction, grouped by character and associated with context. Joke-O-Mat underlines the importance of the speech track for multimedia access.



What to do when multimedia doesn't contain a laugh track? In VideoCLEF 2009 we ran a narrative peak detection task. The goal was to detect points in videos where viewers perceive heightened dramatic tension. Today, CLEF working notes, tomorrow our own Peak-O-Mat?