Vox Populi automatic editing of video documentaries

A mock-up of an edited sequence (Real), generated by selecting the position "War in Afghanistan - For" and the point of view "Propagandist - Create Clash"

Demo

Examples of not edited interviews

InterviewPro

InterviewAgainst

Introduction

This page presents information about VOX POPULI, a system for automatic generation of Biased Video Sequences. In few words, VOX POPULI uses rhetorical annotations to generate video sequences. Our annotation schema encodes the verbal information contained in the audio channel, identifying the claims the interviewees make and the argumentation structures they use to make those claims.Based on this schema, we construct a semantic graph which is traversed by rhetoric-based strategies selecting video segments.

On-line SMIL demo

The demo presents a Web interface to generate a short video documentary, as described in the paper. Please report problems to us.

As an example, a prerendered video sequence is here. The Toulmin analysis of the first part of this video sequence (as described in the above-mentioned paper) is the following:

ToulminSchema

Other projects using Vox Populi

VJ Cultuur is the result of a one-year long research about the culture of VJs in the Netherlands and consists of video interviews with 12 Dutch VJs. From the start of this project it was decided to present the video material in an interactive way using Vox Populi.

VOX POPULI in the media

Radio Interviews

Interview (in Dutch) for the Dutch radio program Noorderlicht over scientific developments, broadcasted on national radio. A local copy of the interview is here.

Interview on the Amsterdam radio Onda Italiana in Dutch, unfortunately it was not recorded.

Press Interviews

Interview (local copy here) with Elke van Cassel, Cursor (weekly information magazine of the University of Eindhoven), nr. 13, 2006.

Press Releases

There has been a press release about Vox Populi which has appeared on the following sites:

Publications and Presentations about VOX POPULI

2006

Presentations

2005

Presentations

Publications

2004

Presentations

Publications

Video Ontology

The annotation are encoded in RDF; the schema is defined here and the instances here; we used Protégé 2000 to edit the RDF files (you can see a screenshot); we used Sesame to store and query our knowledge-base, you can browse and query the same knowledge-base we use here (try for ex. the Explore link). To select all the statements contained in the knoledge-base, try to cut and paste the following SeRQL query here:

select X, SubjectDescription, ModifierDescription, PredicateDescription from {X} VoxPopuli:subject {} VoxPopuli:partDescription {SubjectDescription}, [{X} VoxPopuli:modifier {Modifier} VoxPopuli:partDescription {ModifierDescription}], [{X} VoxPopuli:predicate {Predicate} VoxPopuli:partDescription {PredicateDescription}] using namespace MediaClipping = <http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/MediaClipping#>, VoxPopuli = <http://www.cwi.nl/~media/ns/VP/VoxPopuli.rdfs#>, BasicMedia = <http://www.w3.org/2001/SMIL20/BasicMedia#>