by James M. Turner and Claire Nigay

In a number of research projects over the years, we've shown that the most popular tags users attach to "ordinary" pictures are the same as the indexing terms professional indexers assign to the same pictures. We've also found that if the pictures are tagged in English, good equivalent tags can be generated automatically in French, using web translators. This works just as well if the starting language is French and the tags are automatically generated in English.

However, these two languages share the same alphabet and also have a lot of words in common, so we wondered whether this method would also work for other languages. The ideal situa- tion would be that tags given in any language can be translated automatically into any other language. Once all the pieces are in place, this means that anyone could put in a search state- ment in any language, then picture databases indexed in any of a number of languages could be searched, and the pictures from all the databases would be returned to the user.