BTU DBIS' Multimodal Wikipedia Retrieval Runs at ImageCLEF 2011

In this work, we summarize the results of our first participation in the Wikipedia Retrieval task. For our experiments, we rely on a cognitively motivated IR model: the principle of polyrepresentation. The principle’s core hypothesis is that a document is defined by different representations such as low-level features, or textual content that can be combined in a structured manner reflecting the user’s information need. For our first participation, we used mono-lingual English retrieval in combination with global low-level features without further user interaction or query modification techniques. Our best NOFB reached rank 64 or rank 13 of the mono-lingual English runs. This result is promising as we have not used structural information about the documents. Additionally, our findings are indicating the correctness of the polyrepresentative hypothesis for multimodal retrieval.