Interactive tutoring of cooking activities with personalized multimedia recipe search

With the fast development of the Internet, there are more and more learning resources including various multimedia resources on the Web. Meanwhile, e-learning becomes more popular and important due to its convenience and autonomy. However, how to help users conduct high quality resource retrieval remains a challenge and should be considered first for an e-learning system. The traditional indexing approach which classifies multimedia resources into predefined categories can hardly meet user demands. Collaborative tagging (also known as folksonomy) systems provide users with a simple but powerful mechanism to obtain required multimedia resources. Moreover, feedbacks made by users can be utilized to refine the retrieval results during the interactive process between users and systems. In this paper, we present an interactive tutoring system with personalized multimedia resource search, based on a collaborative tagging mechanism. We also describe several application scenarios in which content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is combined with collaborative tagging to facilitate interactive tutoring in our cooking recipe database system.