The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

Over the past few years, there has been an increased interest in automatic facial behavior analysis and understanding. We present OpenFace — an open source tool intended for computer vision and machine learning researchers, affective computing community and people interested in building interactive applications based on facial behavior analysis. OpenFace is the first open source tool capable of facial landmark detection, head pose estimation, facial action unit recognition, and eye-gaze estimation. The computer vision algorithms which represent the core of OpenFace demonstrate state-of-the-art results in all of the above mentioned tasks. Furthermore, our tool is capable of real-time performance and is able to run from a simple webcam without any specialist hardware. Finally, OpenFace allows for easy integration with other applications and devices through a lightweight messaging system.

/pdf/openface-an-open-source-facial-behavior-analysis-toolkit-2hh0r51fvm.pdf

OpenFace: An open source facial behavior analysis toolkit

The article reviews the book “Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy,” by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

Utilization of computer tools in linguistic research has gained importance with the maturation of media frameworks for the handling of digital audio and video. The increased use of these tools in gesture, sign language and multimodal interaction studies has led to stronger requirements on the flexibility, the efficiency and in particular the time accuracy of annotation tools. This paper describes the efforts made to make ELAN a tool that meets these requirements, with special attention to the developments in the area of time accuracy. In subsequent sections an overview will be given of other enhancements in the latest versions of ELAN that makes it a useful tool in multimodality research.

/pdf/elan-a-professional-framework-for-multimodality-research-dtgsglaj9k.pdf

ELAN : a professional framework for multimodality research

Anvil is a tool for the annotation of audiovisual material containing multimodal dialogue. Annotation takes place on freely definable, multiple layers (tracks) by inserting time-anchored elements that hold a number of typed attribute-value pairs. Higher-level elements (suprasegmental) consist of a sequence of elements. Attributes contain symbols or cross-level links to arbitrary other elements. Anvil is highly generic (usable with different annotation schemes), platform-independent, XMLbased and fitted with an intuitive graphical user interface. For project integration, Anvil offers the import of speech transcription and export of text and table data for further statistical processing.

/pdf/anvil-a-generic-annotation-tool-for-multimodal-dialogue-4obodlykpf.pdf

ANVIL A Generic Annotation Tool for Multimodal Dialogue

This paper shows the actual state of development of the manual annotation tool ELAN. It presents usage requirements from three different groups of users and how one annotation model and a number of generic design principles guided the choices made during the development process of ELAN. Introduction At the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) software development on annotation tools for the manual annotation of multimedia data has been going on since the early 90’s. Over this decade there have been large changes in enabling technology and insights in the nature of linguistic annotation. Media frameworks for the handling of digital audio and especially digital video files have matured, as has media streaming technology. XML has come to existence and has become highly relevant in a short time. Rendering and input of Unicode characters is now commonplace. Simultaneously, users made experiences with the first generation of video annotation tools and became aware of and got used to these new technologies. From this a new set of requirements arose. Finally, annotation tool builders are better aware of each other’s approaches, annotation models and annotation document formats. Clearly convergence is going on, leading to easier exchange of data between annotation tools. An important role in this process was played by the paper by (Bird & Liberman, 2001) that introduced Annotation Graphs. We are closely watching and trying to participate in standards initiatives, as for example ISO TC37/SC4. The first video annotation tool developed at the MPI was MediaTagger, a QuickTime based application that runs only on pre-OS X Macintoshes. It started as a first attempt to exploit the QuickTime Movie data structure, and especially it’s text tracks, as an informal model for linguistic annotation. Since then several new formal models where made, each one building on the experiences of the previous ones and considering new user requirements. The formal modeling languages that were used are Entity-Relationship diagrams and UML. A detailed presentation and evaluation of these models can be found in (Brugman & Wittenburg, 2001). The next chapters will discuss the requirements of several different groups of users and describe the latest state of ELAN functionality. We will then present our model for annotation in some detail and show how we can cover the needs of very different user groups with one relatively simple model. In the discussions plans for future development will presented. 1 http://www.mpi.nl User requirements ELAN is developed with a number of different user groups in mind. These users are situated both within the MPI and, in an increasing number of cases, outside the MPI. Often they are participating in externally funded projects (DoBeS, ECHO). We will discuss the main requirements per group, although there is of course a substantial overlap between each group’s needs.

/pdf/annotating-multi-media-multi-modal-resources-with-elan-4r7hn5ax28.pdf

Annotating Multi-media/Multi-modal Resources with ELAN

Annotation of digital recordings in humanities research still is, to a large extend, a process that is performed manually. This paper describes the first pattern recognition based software components developed in the AVATecH project and their integration in the annotation tool ELAN. AVATecH (Advancing Video/Audio Technology in Humanities Research) is a project that involves two Max Planck Institutes (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle) and two Fraunhofer Institutes (Fraunhofer-Institut fur Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute, Berlin) and that aims to develop and implement audio and video technology for semi-automatic annotation of heterogeneous media collections as they occur in multimedia based research. The highly diverse nature of the digital recordings stored in the archives of both Max Planck Institutes, poses a huge challenge to most of the existing pattern recognition solutions and is a motivation to make such technology available to researchers in the humanities.

/pdf/elan-as-flexible-annotation-framework-for-sound-and-image-10ihpwf33a.pdf

ELAN as flexible annotation framework for sound and image processing detectors

Manual annotation of various media streams, time series data and also text sequences is still a very time consuming work that has to be carried out in many areas of linguistics and beyond. Based on many theoretical discussions and practical experiences professional tools have been deployed such as ELAN that support the researcher in his/her work. Most of these annotation tools operate on local computers. However, since more and more language resources are stored in web-accessible archives, researchers want to take profit from the new possibilities. ANNEX was developed to fill this gap, since it allows web-based analysis of complex annotated media streams, i.e., the users dont have to download resources and dont have to download and install programs. By simply using a normal web-browser they can start their linguistic work. Yet, due to the architecture of the Internet, ANNEX does not offer the options to create annotations, but this feature will come. However, users have to be aware of the fact that media streaming does not offer that high accuracy as on local computers.

/pdf/annex-a-web-based-framework-for-exploiting-annotated-media-4zg3rwgobh.pdf

ANNEX - a web-based Framework for Exploiting Annotated Media Resources

Despite its scientific, political, and practical value, comprehensive information about human languages, in all their variety and complexity, is not readily obtainable and searchable One reason is that many language data are collected as audio and video recordings which imposes a challenge to document indexing and retrieval Annotation of multimedia data provides an opportunity for making the semantics explicit and facilitates the searching of multimedia documents We have developed OntoELAN, an ontology-based linguistic multimedia annotator that features: (1) support for loading and displaying ontologies specified in OWL; (2) creation of a language profile, which allows a user to choose a subset of terms from an ontology and conveniently rename them if needed; (3) creation of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with profile terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) saving annotations in the XML format as Multimedia Ontology class instances and, linked to them, class instances of other ontologies used in ontological tiers To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation

Albert Russel

Papers

ELAN : a professional framework for multimodality research

Annotating Multi-media/Multi-modal Resources with ELAN

ELAN as flexible annotation framework for sound and image processing detectors

ANNEX - a web-based Framework for Exploiting Annotated Media Resources

OntoELAN: An Ontology-based Linguistic Multimedia Annotator