Phrasal Translation for Amharic English Cross Language Information Retrieval (Clir)
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Date
2010-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Amharic is a language most widely used in Ethiopia and serve as the official working language
of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Despite this fact, English serves as medium of
instruction and communication in academic environment, working language in some
governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Ethiopia. This fact showed that there is a
language barrier between what most peoples of Ethiopia are familiar with and expected to use in
their working and academic environment. Hence, experimenting on the applicability of a cross
language information retrieval system for Amharic-English which can break the language
barrier is important. This research is mainly conducted to break the language barrier that
Amharic speaking users face in obtaining and utilizing documents available in English.
The experimentation conduct is employed a corpus based approach which make use of phrasal
query translation. This approach requires accessibility of a large volume of parallel documents
prepared in Amharic and English. News article were used to conduct this research.
The performance of the system was measured by average precision and recall. The result of the
experimentation is recall value of 0.248 for translated Amharic queries, 0.463 for Amharic
queries 0.436 for the baseline English queries. This showed that the result of the translated
queries was low compared to the baseline queries.
The performance of such system is highly dependent on the phrase translation system. Hence
coming up with a good translation model will have a paramount impact on the performance of
the system. Therefore, with the use of adequately large and cleaned parallel Amharic-Englishcorpus, it is possible to develop a phrasal query translation for Amharic English a cross
language information retrieval.
Key words: phrasal query translation, Cross Language Information Retrieval, phrase alignment
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Keywords
phrasal query translation, Cross Language Information Retrieval, phrase alignment