UAIC at iCLEF 2009: Analysis of Logs of Multilingual Image Searches in Flickr Florin-Tudor Cristea, Vlad Alexa, Adrian Iftene UAIC: Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Romania {florin.cristea, vlad.alexa, adiftene}@info.uaic.ro Abstract. In this paper, we summarize our analysis of the large log of multilin- gual image searches in Flickr provided to iCLEF 2009 participants, focusing on the UAIC group. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; H.4 [Information Systems Applications]: H.4.m Miscellaneous General Terms Interactive Information Retrieval, Cross-language Information Retrieval Keywords: iCLEF, Flickr, Log Analysis, Multilingual Image Search, User Studies 1 Introduction iCLEF 1 is the interactive track of CLEF started from 2006, an annual evaluation exer- cise for Multilingual Information Access systems. From year to year iCLEF has changed collections in order to explore user behavior in scenarios where the necessity for cross-language search come more naturally for the average user. The main ques- tion is how best to assist users when searching information written in unknown lan- guages, rather than how best an algorithm can find information written in languages different from the query language. In iCLEF task the user receive an image (not annotated) from Flickr 2 and the goal is to find the image again from Flickr using flickling 3 , the search engine provided by iCLEF organizers. The user does not know in advance in which languages the image 1 iCLEF: http://nlp.uned.es/iCLEF/ 2 Flickr is available at http://www.flickr.com. 3 Flicking interface: http://cabrillo.lsi.uned.es/flickling