The European Network on Integrating Vision and Language (iV&L Net): Combining Computer Vision and Language Processing For Advanced Search, Retrieval, Annotation and Description of Visual Data

The explosive growth of visual and textual data (both on the World Wide Web and held in private repositories by diverse institutions and companies) has led to urgent requirements in terms of search, processing and management of digital content. Solutions for providing access to or mining such data depend on the semantic gap between vision and language being bridged, which in turn calls for expertise from two so far unconnected fields: Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The central goal of iV&L Net is to build a European CV/NLP research community, targeting 4 focus themes: (i) Integrated Modelling of Vision and Language for CV and NLP Tasks; (ii) Applications of Integrated Models; (iii) Automatic Generation of Image & Video Descriptions; and (iv) Semantic Image & Video Search. iV&L Net will organise annual conferences, technical meetings, partner visits, data/task benchmarking, and industry/end-user liaison. Europe has many of the world’s leading CV and NLP researchers. Tapping into this expertise, and bringing the collaboration, networking and community building enabled by COST Actions to bear, iV&L Net will have substantial impact, in terms of advances in both theory/methodology and real world technologies