Towards Making Automated Multimedia Communicate More Effectively: a Multi-Disciplinary Approach

For over a decade, research has been conducted into artificial intelligence systems that have the ability to automatically generate multimedia presentations. The responsibility for insuring the communicative and aesthetic effectiveness of presentations generated by these systems has been restricted to a limited set of linguistic and print-centric discourses. This is opposed to creative practices such as graphic design, sound design, and other disciplines commonly involved in the creation of multimedia presentations. As a result, users (and developers) are often disappointed that automatically-generated presentations lack much of the communicative coherence and multimodal aesthetic qualities of ‘real-world’ multimedia. In this paper we show that defining a presentation’s motivation for communication will determine the disciplines that should be involved in both its creation, and in the formulation of evaluation criteria for ensuring effective communicative and aesthetic outcomes. Such evaluation criteria, if implemented into one of these Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Systems has the potential to significantly improve the communicative efficiency of automatically-generated presentations.