Martha Larson

Senior researcher at the Delft Multimedia Information Retrieval (DMIR) Lab
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Profile
Martha Larson is a researcher in the area of multimedia retrieval with a focus on speech and language. She is an expert in multimedia retrieval techniques that make use of automatic speech recognition and audio analysis. Her more recent work involves multimedia in social networks and human computation, including crowdsourcing.

Within the DMIR Lab she sets her focus on algorithms that are designed to exploit information that is orthogonal to topic. Her work on topical consistency indicators, user preference prediction, social trust and automatic detection of spoken highlights are all related to this focus.

Larson is highly engaged in the international research community. She served on the organization committee of the Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Continuous Speech (2008 - 2010). She is co-organizer of the MediaEval international multimedia benchmarking initiative. She serves on the program committees of numerous conferences in the area of information retrieval (SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM), multimedia (MMM, CBMI) and computational linguistics (COLING). She also reviews for a variety of journals including: ACM Trans. on Information Systems, IEEE Trans. on Speech Audio and Language Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia and ACM Trans. on Interactive Intelligent Systems.

Martha Larson started working in the area of speech recognition and multimedia retrieval in 2000 and her formative experiences included time spent as a visiting researcher at the Technical Informatics department at the University of Duisburg and as an intern at IBM Watson Research Center. Before joining Delft University of Technology, she researched and lectured in the area of audio-visual retrieval at Fraunhofer IAIS and at the University of Amsterdam. She has participated as both researcher and research coordinator in a number of projects including the EU-projects PetaMedia, MultiMatch and SHARE. Her most influential early work was focused on developing vocabulary-independent speech-based access for large radio archives within a industry project during her time at Fraunhofer.

Martha Larson holds a MA and PhD in theoretical linguistics from Cornell University and a BS in Mathematics (concentration in Electrical Engineering) from the University of Wisconsin. She is a member of Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.

Ten Key Scientific Contributions
Larson, M., Kofler, C., Hanjalic, A. Reading between the Tags to Predict Real-World Size-Class for Visually Depicted Objects in Images. ACM Multimedia 2011, pp. 273-282.

Besser, J., Larson, M., Hofmann, K., Podcast Search: User Goals and Retrieval Technologies, Online Information Review: The international journal of digital information research and use, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 395-419, 2010.

Shi, Y., Larson, M. and Hanjalic, A. Towards Understanding the Challenges Facing Effective Trust-Aware Recommendation. ACM RecSys Workshop on Recommender Systems and the Social Web, 2010.

Larson, M. The Empty Subject Construction: Verb Serialization in Baule. In: Aboh, E.O. and Essegbey, J., eds., Topics in Kwa Syntax. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Vol. 78, pp. 195-232, 2010. (book chapter on PhD work in theoretical linguistics)

Soleymani, M. and Larson, M. Crowdsourcing for Affective Annotation of Video: Development of a Viewer-reported Boredom Corpus. ACM SIGIR 2010 Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Search Evaluation, 2010.

Tsagkias, M., Larson, M. and de Rijke, M. Predicting Podcast Preference: An Analysis Framework and its Application, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 374-391, February 2010.

Larson M., Tsagkias E., He J., de Rijke M., Investigating the Global Semantic Impact of Speech Recognition Errors on Spoken Content Retrieval, European Conference on Information Retrieval Conference, 2009.

Leopold, E., Kindermann, J., Paass, G., Volmer, S., Cavet, R., Larson, M., Eickeler, S., Kastner, T. Integrated Classification of Audio, Video and Speech using Partitions of Low-Level Features, ECML Workshop on Multimedia Discovery and Mining, 2003.

Larson, M., Eickeler, S., Paass, G., Leopold, E., Kindermann, J. Exploring sub-word features and linear support vector machines for German spoken document classification. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2002.

Larson, M., Willett, D., Kohler, J., Rigoll, G. Compound splitting and lexical unit recombination for improved performance of a speech recognition system for German parliamentary speeches, International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2000.