Facilitating the manual annotation of sounds when using large taxonomies

Comunicació presentada a: 23rd Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT, celebrat a Bologna, Italy, del 13 al 16 de novembre de 2018.Properly annotated multimedia content is crucial for supporting advances in many Information Retrieval applications. It enables, for instance, the development of automatic tools for the annotation of large and diverse multimedia collections. In the context of everyday sounds and online collections, the content to describe is very diverse and involves many different types of concepts, often organised in large hierarchical structures called taxonomies. This makes the task of manually annotating content arduous. In this paper, we present our user-centered development of two tools for the manual annotation of audio content from a wide range of types. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of functional prototypes involving real users. The goal is to evaluate them in a real context, engage in discussions with users, and inspire new ideas. A qualitative analysis was carried out including usability questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. This revealed interesting aspects to consider when developing tools for the manual annotation of audio content with labels drawn from large hierarchical taxonomies.This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688382 “AudioCommons” and from a Google Faculty Research Award 2017. The authors thank Lorenzo Romanelli for his help with the development of the annotation tools, and the participants of the evaluation for the valuable feedback gathered