FlickLing: a Multilingual Search Interface for Flickr

In this paper, we present FlickLing, a multilingual search interface for Flickr designed and implemented for the CLEF 2008 interactive task. FlickLing consists of two interfaces which allow to perform monolingual and multilingual image retrieval over the Flickr database, retrieving results with images annotated in different languages. From a given query entered by the user, FlickLing performs automatic term-by-term translation into up to six languages, and provides assistance for interactive query refinement and translation. With the goal of collecting a large search log, Flickling works as an online competitive game, where users have to find as many images as possible to obtain the highest individual and team scores. Here we describe the user logs generated, which has been used as a data source for the iCLEF 2008 log analysis task and contain over 5,000 complete search sessions made by over 200 users with a wide variety of language skills.