Cross-language transfer of indexing concepts for storage and retrieval of moving images: Preliminary results

In previous research, participants who screened a videotape of stock footage were asked to assign terms that could be used for retrieval of each shot. The shots were taken from the National Film Board of Canada's stockshot collection, and the data for the study were collected in English. Analysis was undertaken on the most popular terms since they are the potential indexing terms. In the present study, a French-language version of the research tapes was prepared, using the same images. Data were collected in French. The analysis compares the most popular terms identified in each of the two studies for each of the shots, in order to determine the rate of correspondence between potential indexing terms in each language. The long-term goal of this research is to investigate whether useful indexes to moving images can be generated in other languages automatically by filtering the indexing terms assigned in one language through a controlled vocabulary to derive the appropriate terms in the other language.