  We propose a new zero-shot Event Detection method by Multi-modal
Distributional Semantic embedding of videos. Our model embeds object and action
concepts as well as other available modalities from videos into a
distributional semantic space. To our knowledge, this is the first Zero-Shot
event detection model that is built on top of distributional semantics and
extends it in the following directions: (a) semantic embedding of multimodal
information in videos (with focus on the visual modalities), (b) automatically
determining relevance of concepts/attributes to a free text query, which could
be useful for other applications, and (c) retrieving videos by free text event
query (e.g., "changing a vehicle tire") based on their content. We embed videos
into a distributional semantic space and then measure the similarity between
videos and the event query in a free text form. We validated our method on the
large TRECVID MED (Multimedia Event Detection) challenge. Using only the event
title as a query, our method outperformed the state-of-the-art that uses big
descriptions from 12.6% to 13.5% with MAP metric and 0.73 to 0.83 with ROC-AUC
metric. It is also an order of magnitude faster.
