Crosslingual Access to Photo Databases

Abstract

This paper is about search of photos in photo databases of agencies which sell photos over the Internet. The problem is far from the behavior of photo databases managed by librarians and also far from the corpora generally used for research purposes. The descriptions use mainly single words and it is well known that it is not the best way to have a good search. This increases the problem of semantic ambiguity. This problem of semantic ambiguity is crucial for cross-language querying. On the other hand, users are not aware of documentation techniques and use generally very simple queries but want to get precise answers. This paper gives the experience gained in a 3 year use (2006-2008) of a cross-language access to several of the main international commercial photo databases. The languages used were French, English, and German.