Collaborative event annotation in tagged photo collections

Events constitute a significant means of multimedia content organizationand sharing. Despite the recent interest in detecting events and annotating mediacontent in an event-centric way, there is currently insufficient support for managingevents in large-scale content collections and limited understanding of the eventannotation process. To this end, this paper presents CrEve, a collaborative eventannotation framework which uses content found in social media sites with theprime objective to facilitate the annotation of large media corpora with eventinformation. The proposed annotation framework could significantly benefit socialmedia research due to the proliferation of event-related user-contributed content.We demonstrate that, compared to a standard “browse-and-annotate” interface,CrEve leads to a 19% increase in the coverage of the generated ground truth in alarge-scale annotation experiment. Furthermore, the paper discusses the results of auser study that quantifies the performance of CrEve and the contribution of differentevent dimensions in the event annotation process. The study confirms the prevalenceof spatio-temporal queries as the prime option of discovering event-related contentin a large collection. In addition, textual queries and social cues (content contributor) were also found to be significant as event search dimensions. Finally, it demonstratesthe potential of employing automatic photo clustering methods with the goal offacilitating event annotation.