Web information fusion can be defined as the problem of collating and tracking information related to specific topics on the World Wide Web. Whereas most existing work on Web information fusion has focused on text-based multidocument summarization, this paper concerns the topic of image and text association, a cornerstone of cross-media Web information fusion. Specifically, we present two learning methods for discovering the underlying associations between images and texts based on small training data sets. The first method based on vague transformation measures the information similarity between the visual features and the textual features through a set of predefined domain-specific information categories. Another method uses a neural network to learn direct mapping between the visual and textual features by automatically and incrementally summarizing the associated features into a set of information templates. Despite their distinct approaches, our experimental results on a terrorist domain document set show that both methods are capable of learning associations between images and texts from a small training data set.

Traditional text mining techniques transform free text into flat bags of words representation, which does not preserve sufficient semantics for the purpose of knowledge discovery. In this paper, we present a two-step procedure to mine generalized associations of semantic relations conveyed by the textual content of Web documents. First, RDF (resource description framework) metadata representing semantic relations are extracted from raw text using a myriad of natural language processing techniques. The relation extraction process also creates a term taxonomy in the form of a sense hierarchy inferred from WordNet. Then, a novel generalized association pattern mining algorithm (GP-Close) is applied to discover the underlying relation association patterns on RDF metadata. For pruning the large number of redundant overgeneralized patterns in relation pattern search space, the GP-Close algorithm adopts the notion of generalization closure for systematic overgeneralization reduction. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated through empirical experiments conducted on an online database of terrorist activities

In this paper, we present a novel frequent generalized pattern mining algorithm, called GP-Close, for mining generalized associations from RDF metadata. To solve the over-generalization problem encountered by existing methods, GP-Close employs the notion of emphgeneralization closure for systematic over-generalization reduction.