HerCulB: content-based information extraction and retrieval for cultural heritage of the Balkans

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodology for automatic annotation of a multimedia collection of intangible cultural heritage mostly in the form of interviews. Assigned annotations provide a way to search the collection. Design/methodology/approach: Annotation is based on automatic extraction of metadata and is conducted by named entity and topic extraction from textual descriptions with a rule-based approach supported by vocabulary resources, a compiled domain-specific classification scheme and domain-oriented corpus analysis. Findings: The proposed methodology for automatic annotation of a collection of intangible cultural heritage, applied on the cultural heritage of the Balkans, has very good results according to F measure, which is 0.87 for the named entity and 0.90 for topic annotation. The overall methodology enables encapsulating domain-specific and language-specific knowledge into collections of finite state transducers and allows further improvements. Originality/value: Although cultural heritage has a significant role in the development of identity of a group or an individual, it is one of those specific domains that have not yet been fully explored in case of many languages. A methodology is proposed that can be used for incorporating natural language processing techniques into digital libraries of cultural heritage.