Multimodal question answering for mobile devices

TitleMultimodal question answering for mobile devices
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2008
AuthorsTom Yeh, Darrell T
Conference NameProceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
Date Published2008///
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-59593-987-6
KeywordsInformation retrieval, mobile application, pattern matching, Question answering
Abstract

This paper introduces multimodal question answering, a new interface for community-based question answering services. By offering users an extra modality---photos---in addition to the text modality to formulate queries, multimodal question answering overcomes the limitations of text-only input methods when the users ask questions regarding visually distinctive objects. Such interface is especially useful when users become curious about an interesting object in the environment and want to know about it---simply by taking a photo and asking a question in a situated (from a mobile device) and intuitive (without describing the object in words) manner. We propose a system architecture for multimodal question answering, describe an algorithm for searching the database, and report on the findings of two prototype studies.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1378773.1378841
DOI10.1145/1378773.1378841