Construction of a Computer Based Amharic Thesaurus in Water Technology for Use with Information Storage and Retrieval Systems

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Date

1992-05

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

A thesaurus is an organized list of vocabulary in one or- more disciplines structured in such a way that synonymous, broade, narrower and related terms are presented in alphabetical sequence. It is used to guide the user as to which descriptor to select f r om the indexing language for indexing or gettingĀ· access into a database to retrieve relevant information. The objective of this work is to construct a computer- based Amharic Thesaurus in water technology. Considering the responsibilities entrusted upon and the amount of information generated by the Water Resources Commission of Ethiopia, this thesaurus is of immense importance in collecting, analyzing and indexing water related documents written in Amharic, which are hitherto not properly processed, catalogued and indexed for easy r etrieval . After extensive discussions with experts in the field and project site visits, an English-Amharic dictionary holding some 2000 terms was created for use in defining terms and identifying interrelationships among the terms. Then, relationships among these terms entered into the thesaurus was established according to the principles of thesaurus construction. Finally, a sample database of the indexinglanguage is formed using CDS / ISIS, THES. PAS Program translated into Amharic. The work is not fully complete. Further effort is needed to automate the thesaurus entirely and to include local terms that are not yet fully covered. The task of facilitating the development of a multi-lingual system is also an area to be seriously considered in the future.

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Construction of A Computer Based Amharic

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