Descriptive natural-language captions can help organize multimedia data. We described our MARIE system that interprets English queries directing the fetch of media objects. it is novel in the extent to which it exploits previously interpreted and indexed English captions for the media objects. Our routine filtering of queries through descriptively-complex captions (as opposed to keyword lists) before retrieving data can actually improve retrieval speed, as media data are often bulky and time consuming to retrieve, difficult upon which to perform content analysis, and even small improvements to query prevision can often pay off. Handling the English of captions and queries about them is not as difficult as it might seems, as the matching does not require deep understanding, just a comprehensive type hierarchy for caption concepts. An important innovation of MARIE is supercaptions describing sets of captions, which can minimize caption redundancy. Databases, Natural-language, Captions, Multimedia.