Towards a Universal Query Representation for Multimodal Information Retreival
The field of information retrieval, especially when targeting multimodal content, has found ways of satisfying a broad range of information needs, which can be expressed in a multitude of ways. In contrast to related fields, such as, relational databases, no universal way of representing the queries to be answered by a retrieval system has emerged. In this paper, we present an initial proposal for a universal query representation mechanism for multimodal information retrieval. The proposed approach imperatively expresses arbitrary information needs, using a DAG of query primitives. We show how such a representation can be used for both feature extraction and query processing pipelines and how it can serve as a foundation towards a query language for information retrieval.