An interactive system provides for increasing retrieval performance of images depicting text by allowing users to provide relevance feedback on words contained in the images. The system includes a user interface through which the user queries the system with query terms for images contained in the system. Word image suggestions are displayed to the user through the user interface, where each word image suggestion contains the same or slightly variant text as recognized from the word image by the system than the particular query terms. Word image suggestions can be included in the system by the user to increase system recall of images for the one or more query terms and can be excluded from the system by the user to increase precision of image retrieval results for particular query terms.