Metadata and Multilinguality in Video Classification

The VideoCLEF 2008 Vid2RSS task involves the assignment of thematic category labels to dual language (Dutch/English) television episode videos. The University of Amsterdam chose to focus on exploiting archival metadata and speech transcripts generated by both Dutch and English speech recognizers. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier was trained on training data collected from Wikipedia. The results provide evidence that combining archival metadata with speech transcripts can improve classification performance, but that adding speech transcripts in an additional language does not yield performance gains.