Instant messaging service is an important aspect of social media and sprung up in last decades. Traditional instant messaging service transfers information mainly based on textual message, while the visual message is ignored to a great extent. Such instant messaging service is thus far from satisfactory in all-around information communication. In this paper, we propose a novel visual assisted instant messaging scheme named Chat with illustration (CWI), which presents users visual messages associated with textual message automatically. When users start their chat, the system first identifies meaningful keywords from dialogue content and analyzes grammatical and logical relations. Then CWI explores keyword-based image search on a hierarchically clustering image database which is built offline. Finally, according to grammatical and logical relations, CWI assembles these images properly and presents an optimal visual message. With the combination of textual and visual message, users could get a more interesting and vivid communication experience. Especially for different native language speakers, CWI can help them cross language barrier to some degree. In addition, a visual dialogue summarization is also proposed, which help users recall the past dialogue. The in-depth user studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our visual assisted instant messaging scheme.
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