5. The method according to claim 1 , wherein at least one semantic word is associated with the received query as an implicit semantic concept, the probabilistic framework is a semantic probabilistic framework in which multimedia works are mapped to semantic concepts, and the at least one semantic word is used to search the mapped multimedia works within the probabilistic semantic framework.
1. A method of ranking multimedia works with respect to a query, comprising: (a) storing, in a memory, information defining a conditional probability framework representing a plurality of concepts represented within at least two different media types of multimedia works comprising semantic concepts and visual feature concepts, based on analysis of at least a subset of the plurality of works; (b) receiving a query comprising information defining at least one of the semantic concepts and the visual feature concepts; (c) automatically determining a set of multimedia works of the at least two different media types corresponding to the at least one of said concepts associated with the query by associating semantic concepts of a first multimedia work with visual feature concepts of a second multimedia work as annotations, using a probabilistic framework comprising a visual feature layer, a semantic layer, and a hidden concept layer which connects the visual feature layer and the semantic layer, with at least one automated processor, wherein conditional probabilities of the visual feature concepts and the annotations given a hidden concept class are determined based on an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based iterative learning procedure; (d) automatically ranking the determined set of multimedia works of the at least two different media types determined to correspond to the at least one of said concepts associated with the query in accordance with a relevance to the query according to a joint probability distribution which models a probability that the query associated with the at least one of said concepts is associated with a respective multimedia work, with the at least one automated processor; and (e) at least one of (i) storing in the memory, and (ii) outputting information selectively dependent on the ranking.