The Connection between the Text and Images of News Articles: New Insights for Multimedia Analysis

Nelleke Oostdijk, Hans van Halteren, Erkan Bașar, Martha Larson


Abstract
We report on a case study of text and images that reveals the inadequacy of simplistic assumptions about their connection and interplay. The context of our work is a larger effort to create automatic systems that can extract event information from online news articles about flooding disasters. We carry out a manual analysis of 1000 articles containing a keyword related to flooding. The analysis reveals that the articles in our data set cluster into seven categories related to different topical aspects of flooding, and that the images accompanying the articles cluster into five categories related to the content they depict. The results demonstrate that flood-related news articles do not consistently report on a single, currently unfolding flooding event and we should also not assume that a flood-related image will directly relate to a flooding-event described in the corresponding article. In particular, spatiotemporal distance is important. We validate the manual analysis with an automatic classifier demonstrating the technical feasibility of multimedia analysis approaches that admit more realistic relationships between text and images. In sum, our case study confirms that closer attention to the connection between text and images has the potential to improve the collection of multimodal information from news articles.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.535
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4343–4351
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.535
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nelleke Oostdijk, Hans van Halteren, Erkan Bașar, and Martha Larson. 2020. The Connection between the Text and Images of News Articles: New Insights for Multimedia Analysis. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4343–4351, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
The Connection between the Text and Images of News Articles: New Insights for Multimedia Analysis (Oostdijk et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.535.pdf