Retrieval of multimedia stimuli with semantic and emotional cues: Suggestions from a controlled study

TL;DR

This study investigates how semantic and emotional cues affect multimedia picture retrieval efficiency, revealing that emotional annotations suffice for quick retrieval in small datasets, while semantic annotations are essential for larger collections.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of emotional versus semantic annotations in multimedia retrieval across different dataset sizes.

Findings

Emotional annotations enable faster retrieval in small datasets.

Semantic annotations improve efficiency in larger datasets.

Study conducted with 75 participants in a controlled environment.

Abstract

The ability to efficiently search pictures with annotated semantics and emotion is an important problem for Human-Computer Interaction with considerable interdisciplinary significance. Accuracy and speed of the multimedia retrieval process depends on the chosen metadata annotation model. The quality of such multifaceted retrieval is opposed to the potential complexity of data setup procedures and development of multimedia annotations. Additionally, a recent study has shown that databases of emotionally annotated multimedia are still being predominately searched manually which highlights the need to study this retrieval modality. To this regard we present a study with N = 75 participants aimed to evaluate the influence of keywords and dimensional emotions in manual retrieval of pictures. The study showed that if the multimedia database is comparatively small emotional annotations are sufficient to achieve a fast retrieval despite comparatively lesser overall accuracy. In a larger dataset semantic annotations became necessary for efficient retrieval although they contributed to a slower beginning of the search process. The experiment was performed in a controlled environment with a team of psychology experts. The results were statistically consistent with validates measures of the participants' perceptual speed.