%0 Journal Article %T Hierarchical Fuzzy Feature Similarity Combination for Presentation Slide Retrieval %A A. Kushki %A M. Ajmal %A K. N. Plataniotis %J EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing %D 2009 %I Springer %R 10.1155/2008/547923 %X This paper proposes a novel XML-based system for retrieval of presentation slides to address the growing data mining needs in presentation archives for educational and scholarly settings. In particular, contextual information, such as structural and formatting features, is extracted from the open format XML representation of presentation slides. In response to a textual user query, each extracted feature is used to compute a fuzzy relevance score for each slide in the database. The fuzzy scores from the various features are then combined through a hierarchical scheme to generate a single relevance score per slide. Various fusion operators and their properties are examined with respect to their effect on retrieval performance. Experimental results indicate a significant increase in retrieval performance measured in terms of precision-recall. The improvements are attributed to both the incorporation of the contextual features and the hierarchical feature combination scheme. %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2008/547923