Are Users Willing to Search Cross-Language? An Experiment with the Flickr Image Sharing Repository

This paper summarizes the participation of UNED in the CLEF 2006 interactive task. Our goal was to measure the attitude of users towards cross-language searching when the search system provides the possibility (as an option) of searching cross-language, and when the search tasks can clearly benefit from searching in multiple languages. Our results indicate that, even in the most favorable setting (the results are images that can be often interpreted as relevant without reading their descriptions, and the system can make translations in a transparent way to the user), users often avoid translating their query into unknown languages.