Anna Lenkiewicz was appointed as ESR in CLARA  at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, from August 1st, 2011 for a period of two years. Her research within the CLARA project is focused on the language technology field (linguistic infrastructures, interoperability, standards and semantic web).

She participates in the CLARA subproject Designing and Testing Common Infrastructures, which is led by the MPI.

The work to be carried out is to define a media query language/interface, which would allow searching for specific patterns or features in audio and video recordings. The idea for this topic was inspired by the need of creation of automatic annotation tool which may allow researchers to efficiently annotate hours of recordings with very little supervision. The interface on the input side uses recognizers developed by the MPI in cooperation with partner organizations. Those recognizers are able to automatically track and deliver data describing movement and speech of an actor. The challenge is to narrow down the semantic gap which appears while creating those annotations. The language should be easy enough for the user to be able to create queries and annotations, which are meaningful for researcher, and at the same time able to translate request into computer understandable language.

CLARA Publications:

• Lenkiewicz, P., Wittenburg, P., Gebre, B. G., Lenkiewicz, A., Schreer, O., & Masneri, S. (2011). Application of video processing methods for linguistic research. In Z. Vetulani (Ed.), Human language technologies as a challenge for computer science and linguistics. Proceedings of the 5th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2011), November 25-27, 2011, Poznań, Poland (pp. 561-564).