Exploring the potentials of combining photo annotating tasks with instant messaging fun

Abstract

The combination of photo annotation tasks and with instant messaging fun offers great potentials to both end-users and researchers. In this paper, we first describe our prototype system that allows users to share and annotate digital photos over the Internet while they are chatting online. In addition to manual annotation, our system can extract information from conversations to generate extra annotations. The advantage of using our system is that the boring and tedious task of annotating photos is turned into an essential part of an attractive fun activity, viz. online chatting. Extracting meaningful information from instant messages is challenged by abbreviations, pronouns, jargon, ellipsis, grammatical errors, ambiguities and asynchrony, all of which frequently appear in message conversations. In the paper we provide a roadmap, i.e. a systematic analysis of linguistic aspects of automated interpretation of message conversations.