A structure-based approach for multimedia information filtering

While multimedia documents are sequentially presented to users, an information filtering (IF) system is useful to achieve a good retrieval performance in terms of both quality and efficiency. Conventional approaches for designing an IF system are based on the user's evaluation on information relevance degree (IRD), but ignore other attributes in system design such as relative importance of the data in a collection of multimedia documents. In this paper, we aim at developing a framework of designing structure-based multimedia IF systems, which incorporates the characteristics of the importance and relevance of multimedia documents. A method of calculating the values of relative importance degree of multimedia documents is proposed. Furthermore, these values are combined into the IRD of multimedia documents to improve the representation of user profiles. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the proposed techniques.