Amharic - English cross-lingual information retrieval (Cllr): A corpus based approach
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Date
2009-08
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Amharic is the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of
Ethiopia. On the other hand, English serves as medium of instruction and
communication in educational centers, working language in governmental and nongovernmental
organizations in Ethiopia. Thus, experimenting on the applicability of a
cross language information retrieval system for Amharic-English that can break the
language barrier is important. This research is conducted to break the language
barrier that users face in obtaining and using documents prepared in Amharic and
English. Amharic is the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of
Ethiopia. On the other hand, English serves as medium of instruction and
communication in educational centers, working language in governmental and nongovernmental
organizations in Ethiopia. Thus, experimenting on the applicability of a
cross language information retrieval system for Amharic-English that can break the
language barrier is important. This research is conducted to break the language
barrier that users face in obtaining and using documents prepared in Amharic and
English.
The method that is employed to conduct the experimentation is a corpus-based
approach. This approach requires availability of a large volume of parallel documents
prepared in Amharic and English. The documents that were collected to conduct this
research are news articles and legal items.The performance of the system was measured by precision and recall. At the first
phase of the experimentation, precision values were very low - the highest being 0.2
and 0.3 for Amharic and English respectively. This was due to the index term list
which could not fully represent the documents used for the experimentation. The
process of indexing removed important terms from index list which resulted in lack of
documents to be retrieved for most of the queries. Thus, the index list was modified,
i.e., all the terms which occur in the corpus with the exception of stop words were
used. This showed the increase in precision values - the highest being 0.36 and
0.33 for Amharic and English documents respectively. Therefore, with the use of
sufficiently large and cleaned parallel Amharic-English document collection, it is
possible to develop a cross language information retrieval for the language pairs.
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Information Science