1. A computer system having one or more memories and one or more central processing units (CPUs), the system comprising: one or more multimedia items, stored in the memories, each multimedia item having two or more disparate modalities, the disparate modalities being at least one or more visual modalities and one or more textual modalities; and a combining process that creates a visual feature vector for each of the visual modalities and a textual feature vector for each of the textual modalities, and concatenates the visual feature vectors and the textual feature vectors into a unified feature vector.