Computational linguistics for metadata building: Aggregating text processing technologies for enhanced image access

We present a system which applies text mining using computational linguistic techniques to automatically extract, categorize, disambiguate and filter metadata for image access. Candidate subject terms are identified through standard approaches; novel semantic categorization using machine learning and disambiguation using both WordNet and a domain specific thesaurus are applied. The resulting metadata can be manually edited by image catalogers or filtered by semi-automatic rules. We describe the implementation of this workbench created for, and evaluated by, image catalogers. We discuss the system\u27s current functionality, developed under the Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) research project. The CLiMB Toolkit has been tested with several collections, including: Art Images for College Teaching (AICT), ARTStor, the National Gallery of Art (NGA), the Senate Museum, and from collaborative projects such as the Landscape Architecture Image Resource (LAIR) and the field guides of the Vernacular Architecture Group (VAG)