Book excerpt: Modern society exists in a digital era in which high volumes of multimedia information exists. To optimize the management of this data, new methods are emerging for more efficient information retrieval. Web Semantics for Textual and Visual Information Retrieval is a pivotal reference source for the latest academic research on embedding and associating semantics with multimedia information to improve data retrieval techniques. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as automation, knowledge discovery, and social networking, this book is ideally designed for researchers, practitioners, students, and professionals interested in emerging trends in information retrieval.