Providing Multilingual Access to FLICKR for Arabic Users

In this paper we describe our submission for iCLEF2006: an interface that allows users to search FLICKR in Arabic for images with captions in a range of languages. We report and discuss the results gained from a user experiment in accordance with directives given by iCLEF, including an analysis of the success of search tasks. To enable the searching of multilingual image annotations we use English as an interlingua. An Arabic-English dictionary is used for initial query translation, and then Babelfish is used to translate between English and French, German, Italian, Dutch and Spanish. Users are able to modify the English version of the query if they have the necessary language skills to do so. We have chosen to experiment with Arabic retrieval from FLICKR due to the growing numbers of online Middle Eastern users, the limited numbers of interactive Arabic user studies for cross-language IR to date, and the availability of resources to undertake a user study.