Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products are disclosed for the association of relevant images with text and presentation of image recommendations to users. In an aspect, text, image and user/usage information is processed in order to extract features therefrom and create three-component feature vectors called triplets. One or more reference databases store the triplets and a modeling component builds a model to learn and recommend images based on the triplets stored. A reference database may be initially populated with information from publically available image/text for use by the modeling component. Using the model, an Illustration Index is calculated for each image in a collection for a given text. Images are ranked by their Illustration Index and provided as recommendations for use with the text. User interactions with images provides the system with personalized feedback, adding new associations/triplets to the reference database to further refine the model.