Words and pictures in the news

Abstract

We discuss the properties of a collection of news photos and captions, collected from the Associated Press and Reuters. Captions have a vocabulary dominated by proper names. We have implemented various text clustering algorithms to organize these items by topic, as well as an iconic matcher that identifies articles that share a picture. We have found that the special structure of captions allows us to extract some names of people actually portrayed in the image quite reliably, using a simple syntactic analysis. We have been able to build a directory of face images of individuals from this collection.