Dictionary-Based Amharic – English Information Retrieval

Abstract

We present two approaches to the Amharic – English bilingual track in CLEF 2004. Both experiments use a dictionary based approach to translate the Amharic queries into English Bags-of-words, but while one approach removes non-content bearing words from the Amharic queries based on their IDF value, the other uses a list of English stop words to perform the same task. The resulting translated (English) terms are then submitted to a retrieval engine that supports the Boolean and vector-space models. In our experiments, the second approach (based on a list of English stop words) performs slightly better than the one based on IDF values for the Amharic terms.