Negotiating the Semantic Gap: From Feature Maps to Semantic Landscapes

– In this paper, we present the results of our work that seeks to negotiate the gap between low-level features and high-level concepts in the domain of web document retrieval. This work concerns a technique, latent semantic indexing (LSI), which has been used for textual information retrieval for many years. In this environment, LSI determines clusters of co-occurring keywords, sometimes, called concepts, so that a query which uses a particular keyword can then retrieve documents perhaps not containing this keyword, but containing other keywords from the same cluster. In this paper, we examine the use of this technique for content-based web document retrieval, using both keywords and image features to represent the documents.