User experiments with the Eurovision cross-language image retrieval system

In this paper we present Eurovision, a text-based system for cross-language (CL) image retrieval. The system is evaluated by multilingual users for two search tasks with the system configured in English and five other languages. To our knowledge this is the first published set of user experiments for CL image retrieval. We show that: (1) it is possible to create a usable multilingual search engine using little knowledge of any language other than English, (2) categorizing images assists the user's search, and (3) there are differences in the way users search between the proposed search tasks. Based on the two search tasks and user feedback, we describe important aspects of any CL image retrieval system

Searching and organizing images across languages

With the continual growth of users on the Web from a wide range of countries, supporting such users in their search of cultural heritage collections will grow in importance. In the next few years, the growth areas of Internet users will come from the Indian sub-continent and China. Consequently, if holders of cultural heritage collections wish their content to be viewable by the full range of users coming to the Internet, the range of languages that they need to support will have to grow. This paper will present recent work conducted at the University of Sheffield (and now being implemented in BRICKS) on how to use automatic translation to provide search and organisation facilities for a historical image search engine. The system allows users to search for images in seven different languages, providing means for the user to examine translated image captions and browse retrieved images organised by categories written in their native language

An Investigation on Text-Based Cross-Language Picture Retrieval Effectiveness through the Analysis of User Queries

Purpose: This paper describes a study of the queries generated from a user experiment for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) from a historic image archive. Italian speaking users generated 618 queries for a set of known-item search tasks. The queries generated by user’s interaction with the system have been analysed and the results used to suggest recommendations for the future development of cross-language retrieval systems for digital image libraries. Methodology: A controlled lab-based user study was carried out using a prototype Italian-English image retrieval system. Participants were asked to carry out searches for 16 images provided to them, a known-item search task. User’s interactions with the system were recorded and queries were analysed manually quantitatively and qualitatively. Findings: Results highlight the diversity in requests for similar visual content and the weaknesses of Machine Translation for query translation. Through the manual translation of queries we show the benefits of using high-quality translation resources. The results show the individual characteristics of user’s whilst performing known-item searches and the overlap obtained between query terms and structured image captions, highlighting the use of user’s search terms for objects within the foreground of an image. Limitations and Implications: This research looks in-depth into one case of interaction and one image repository. Despite this limitation, the discussed results are likely to be valid across other languages and image repository. Value: The growing quantity of digital visual material in digital libraries offers the potential to apply techniques from CLIR to provide cross-language information access services. However, to develop effective systems requires studying user’s search behaviours, particularly in digital image libraries. The value of this paper is in the provision of empirical evidence to support recommendations for effective cross-language image retrieval system design.</p

Radio Oranje: Enhanced Access to a Historical Spoken Word Collection

Access to historical audio collections is typically very restricted:\ud content is often only available on physical (analog) media and the\ud metadata is usually limited to keywords, giving access at the level\ud of relatively large fragments, e.g., an entire tape. Many spoken\ud word heritage collections are now being digitized, which allows the\ud introduction of more advanced search technology. This paper presents\ud an approach that supports online access and search for recordings of\ud historical speeches. A demonstrator has been built, based on the\ud so-called Radio Oranje collection, which contains radio speeches by\ud the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina that were broadcast during World War II.\ud The audio has been aligned with its original 1940s manual\ud transcriptions to create a time-stamped index that enables the speeches to be\ud searched at the word level. Results are presented together with\ud related photos from an external database

Automatic organisation of retrieved images into a hierarchy

Image retrieval is of growing interest to both search engines and academic researchers with increased focus on both content-based and caption-based approaches. Image search, however, is different from document retrieval: users often search a broader set of retrieved images than they would examine returned web pages in a search engine. In this paper, we focus on a concept hierarchy generation approach developed by Sanderson and Croft in 1999, which was used to organise retrieved images in a hierarchy automatically generated from image captions. Thirty participants were recruited for the study. Each of them conducted two different kinds of searching tasks within the system. Results indicated that the user retrieval performance in both interfaces of system is similar. However, the majority of users preferred to use the concept hierarchy to complete their searching tasks and they were satisfied with using the hierarchical menu to organize retrieved results, because the menu appeared to provide a useful summary to help users look through the image results

Automatically organising images using concept hierarchies

In this paper we discuss the use of concept hierarchies, an approach to automatically organize a set of documents based upon a set of concepts derived from the documents themselves for image retrieval. Co-occurrence between terms associated with image captions and a statistical relation called subsumption are used to generate term clusters which are organized hierarchically. Previously, the approach has been studied for document retrieval and results have shown that automatically generating hierarchies can help users with their search task. In this paper we present an implementation of concept hierarchies for image retrieval, together with preliminary ad-hoc evaluation. Although our approach requires more investigation, initial results from a prototype system are promising and would appear to provide a useful summary of the search results

Overview of the 2005 cross-language image retrieval track (ImageCLEF)

The purpose of this paper is to outline efforts from the 2005 CLEF crosslanguage image retrieval campaign (ImageCLEF). The aim of this CLEF track is to explore the use of both text and content-based retrieval methods for cross-language image retrieval. Four tasks were offered in the ImageCLEF track: a ad-hoc retrieval from an historic photographic collection, ad-hoc retrieval from a medical collection, an automatic image annotation task, and a user-centered (interactive) evaluation task that is explained in the iCLEF summary. 24 research groups from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities (14 countries) participated in ImageCLEF. In this paper we describe the ImageCLEF tasks, submissions from participating groups and summarise the main fndings

iCLEF 2006 Overview: Searching the Flickr WWW photo-sharing repository

This paper summarizes the task design for iCLEF 2006 (the CLEF interactive track). Compared to previous years, we have proposed a radically new task: searching images in a naturally multilingual database, Flickr, which has millions of photographs shared by people all over the planet, tagged and described in a wide variety of languages. Participants are expected to build a multilingual search front-end to Flickr (using Flickr’s search API) and study the behaviour of the users for a given set of searching tasks. The emphasis is put on studying the process, rather than evaluating its outcome