FlickLing is 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. Since it has been design with the goal of collecting a large search log, it works as an online competitive game, where users have to find as many images as possible to obtain the highest individual and team scores.

The graphical user interface is implemented in Java using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and makes extensive use of the GWT-Ext library. The web services are implemented in Python using the TurboGears web application framework. Databases are stored in a MySQL server.

Most of the FlickLing functionalities can be accessed through any modern web browser (Firefox 2 or greater).

FlickLing search engine consists of two basic components: 1) the graphical user interface which controls the search engine features (queries, ranking of results, etc.), functionalities related to cross-linguality (translations, suggestions, related terms, etc.) and the game-like features of the task (flow of images, users ranking, etc.); 2) a set of web services working behind which are in charge of accessing Flickr, managing the system’s databases and generating user logs.

FlickLing is designed as an online competitive game. It allows to perform monolingual and multilingual searches in up to six different languages over the Flickr image collection. The systems captures users’ interactions and generates extensive user logs, which are freely available at: http://nlp.uned.es/iCLEF/2008/iclef2008.logs.zip.

FlickLing is the result of a PhD thesis.

• V. Peinado, J. Artiles, J. Gonzalo, E. Barker, F. López- Ostenero. FlickLing: a Multilingual Search Interface for Flickr., Working Notes for the CLEF 2008 Workshop. 2008.
• P. Clough, J. Gonzalo, J. Karlgren, E. Barker, J. Artiles, V. Peinado . Large-Scale Interactive Evaluation of Multilingual Information Access Systems – the iCLEF Flickr Challenge. Workshop on Novel Methodologies for Evaluation in Information Retrieval. 30th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2008). 2008.