NrityaManch: An Annotation and Retrieval System for Bharatanatyam Dance

This paper presents an annotation and retrieval application named NrityaManch dedicated explicitly to the Indian classical dance. We primarily choose Bharatanatyam dance for the application development. We exploit ontology technique which captures dance image’s annotation details and structurally organizes the dance database. An OWL2 ontology is developed in Protégé 5.5.0 which is validated using HermiT 1.4.3.456 reasoner to maintain consistency. A user interface is provided for the manual annotation of dance images. Initially, we focus on dancer details, dance details, and elements of static dance posture like hasta mudra during the annotation. All annotation details are saved in RDF/XML file. A search window is provided, which facilitates two types of search - natural language query search and tight query search. Named Entity Recognition (NER) pipeline mechanism is utilized in this work which facilitates keyword extraction from natural language queries. A SPARQL query is automatically generated by the system which is applied to the RDF corpus in order to retrieve distinct images. The NER pipeline mechanism achieves an accuracy of 80% for our dance dataset. The system achieves an average f-score value of 0.8547 for the retrieval functionality. The proposed system intends to help dance learners to find dance resources in a dedicated place and will also help in Indian classical dance preservation.