The present disclosure describes systems and methods for information retrieval. Embodiments of the disclosure provide a color embedding network trained using machine learning techniques to generate embedded color representations for color terms included in a text search query. For example, techniques described herein are used to represent color text in a same space as color embeddings (e.g., an embedding space created by determining a histogram of LAB based colors in a three-dimensional (3D) space). Further, techniques are described for indexing color palettes for all the searchable images in the search space. Accordingly, color terms in a text query are directly converted into a color palette and an image search system can return one or more search images with corresponding color palettes that are relevant to (e.g., within a threshold distance from) the color palette of the text query.