The European Network on Integrating Vision and Language

Funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), the The European Network on Integrating Vision and Language (iV&L Net): Combining Computer Vision and Language Processing For Advanced Search, Retrieval, Annotation and Description of Visual Data, COST Action IC1307, was designed to bring together two previously unconnected research communities, Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). It was set up to allow researchers to meet, exchange ideas, expertise and technology, and form new partnerships.

The explosive growth of visual and textual data (both on the World Wide Web and held in private repositories by diverse institutions and companies) had led to urgent requirements in terms of search, processing and management of digital content.

Solutions for providing access to or mining such data depended on the semantic gap between vision and language being bridged, which in turn called for expertise from two previously unconnected fields: Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The central goal of iV&L Net is to build a European CV/NLP research community, targeting 4 focus themes: (i) Integrated Modelling of Vision and Language for CV and NLP Tasks; (ii) Applications of Integrated Models; (iii) Automatic Generation of Image & Video Descriptions; and (iv) Semantic Image & Video Search.

Building on the successful EPSRC Network on Vision and Language (V&L Net), the aim of the COST Action is to create a lasting interdisciplinary research community situated at the nexus between language processing and computer vision. 

iV&L Net aimed to organise annual conferences, technical meetings, partner visits, data/task benchmarking, and industry/end-user liaison. Europe has many of the world's leading CV and NLP researchers. Tapping into this expertise, and bringing the collaboration, networking and community building enabled by COST Actions to bear, iV&L Net was envisioned to have substantial impact in terms of advances in both theory/methodology and real world technologies.