Retrieval of multimedia stimuli with semantic and emotional cues: Suggestions from a controlled study

The ability to efficiently search pictures with annotated semantics and emotion is an important problem for Human-Computer Interaction with considerable interdisciplinary significance. Accuracy and speed of the multimedia retrieval process depends on the chosen metadata annotation model. The quality of such multifaceted retrieval is opposed to the potential complexity of data setup procedures and development of multimedia annotations. Additionally, a recent study has shown that databases of emotionally annotated multimedia are still being predominately searched manually which highlights the need to study this retrieval modality. To this regard we present a study with N = 75 participants aimed to evaluate the influence of keywords and dimensional emotions in manual retrieval of pictures. The study showed that if the multimedia database is comparatively small emotional annotations are sufficient to achieve a fast retrieval despite comparatively lesser overall accuracy. In a larger dataset semantic annotations became necessary for efficient retrieval although they contributed to a slower beginning of the search process. The experiment was performed in a controlled environment with a team of psychology experts. The results were statistically consistent with validates measures of the participants' perceptual speed.