One of my previous posts was about NMF. That turned to be a very good source of new ideas. We developed the idea further, and proposed an algorithm to do multimodal indexing that works pretty well. We published three papers on the topic [1,2,3], and we were invited to submit an extended version to a journal. Also we used it as a basis to our submission to the ImageCLEF competition.
I think there are still many things we can do with NMF. Among others: to extend it to a semi-supervised mutimodal setting, to explore more efficient alternatives (José Guillermo is actively working on that), and to exploit its relationships with other methods. The next figure illustrates the last point:
As it can be seen, that it relates with a wide set of different algorithms that range from semisupervised learning to latent space embedding. I think these are very nice theoretical results, but also they have a good potential to widen the application alternatives of NMF.
Other things had happened since I came back from USA: I stayed in Colombia for three months and I went to Paris, for other three months. I was working on very interesting things here in Paris. I'm going back to Colombia tomorrow. My courses started already thanks to the collaboration of Edwin, David and Pacho, however I have to take on this week. I hope I'll have the time to, at least, make one or two more posts.
[1] González, F. A., Caicedo, J. C., Nasraoui, O., and Ben-Abdallah, J. 2010. NMF-based multimodal image indexing for querying by visual example. In Proceedings of the ACM international Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (Xi'an, China, July 05 - 07, 2010). CIVR '10. ACM, New York, NY, 366-373. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1816041.1816094
[2] Ben-Abdallah, J., Caicedo, J. C., González, F. A., Nasraoui, O., Multimodal Image Annotation Using Non-negative Matrix Factorization, In Proceedings of the IEEE Web Intelligence Conference (Toronto, Canada, Aug. 31, 2010), IEEE-WIC 2010. IEEE (to appear).
[3] Camargo, J., Caicedo, J. C., González, F. A., Multimodal Image Collection Visualization using Non-negative Matrix Factorization, in Proceedings fo the European Conference in Digital Libraries (Glasgow,UK, September 2010), LNCS Springer (to appear).
