Users’ Image Seeking Behavior in a Multilingual Tag Environment

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a user study conducted in the framework of the Interactive Image Retrieval task at CLEF 2009. The main goal of our research is to understand the way in which users search for images that have been annotated with multilingual tags. The study is based on the application of grounded theory to try to understand the challenges that users face when searching for images that have multilingual annotations, and how they cope with these challenges to find the information they need. The study includes two methods of data collection: an online survey and a face to face interview that included a search task using Flickling. Because this was our first year participating in the interactive image CLEF, we found that the most challenging aspect of conducting a user centered evaluation in the context of CLEF is the short amount of time that is available from the time the task is defined and the deadline for submitting results. We were able to conduct face to face interviews for approximately three weeks (from 6/29/2009 to 7/17/2009) before the Flickling system was shut down. Our online survey was also made available at the end of June and we report here the results that we have collected until the end of November 2009. During this time we collected 27 responses to the online questionnaire and 6 face to face interviews. Our results indicate that 67% of the users search for images at least once a week and that the most common purposes for finding images are entertainment and professional. Our results from the user interviews indicate that the users find the known-item retrieval task hard to do due to the difficulty in expressing the contents of the target image using tags that could have also been assigned by the creator of the image. The face to face interviews also give some feedback for improving the current Flickling interface, particularly the addition of a spell checking mechanism and the improvement of the multilingual translation of terms selected by users.