From the fall of the Tower of Babel to the Esperanto global language movement, many humans have dreamed of sharing a common tongue. Despite the Internet's promise of global communication, language barriers remain. Even pictures on the Web get lost in translation.
"Images are universal, but image search is not," said Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. "A person who types his or her search in English won't find images tagged in Chinese, and a Dutch person won't find images tagged in English. We've created a collaborative tool that solves this problem."
A new multilingual search tool developed at the UW's Turing Center makes the universal appeal of pictures available to all. PanImages, presented today at the Machine Translation Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, allows people to search for images on the Web using hundreds of languages.
Search engines such as Google look for images by detecting the search term in captions and other nearby text. But since the process looks for a string of letters, the results are limited to the seeker's mother tongue.
The new tool is named PanImages, from the Greek prefix, "pan," meaning whole or all-inclusive. It automatically translates the search term into about 300 other languages, suggests a few that might work and then displays images from Google and the online photo database Flickr.
PanImages promises to help people who speak languages that have a small Web presence. Imagine you are a Zulu speaker looking for a picture of a refrigerator, Etzioni said. You type the Zulu word for refrigerator ("ifriji") into an image search and get two results. The same search using PanImages generates 472,000 hits. In a test of so-called minor languages, PanImages was able to find 57 times more results, on average, than a Google image search.
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