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.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
http://www.ethnologue.org/ (2004)
Bender, M.L., Head, S.W., Cowley, R.: The ethiopian writing system. In: Bender, M.L., et al. (eds.) Language in Ethiopia. Oxford University Press, London (1976)
Leslau, W.: Amharic Textbook. Berkeley University, Berkeley (1968)
Aklilu, A.: Amharic - English Dictionary. Kuraz Printing Enterprise (1987)
Singhal, A., Buckley, C., Mitra, M.: Pivoted document length normalization. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Zürich, Switzerland, ACM SIGIR (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Argaw, A.A., Asker, L., Cöster, R., Karlgren, J. (2005). Dictionary-Based Amharic – English Information Retrieval. In: Peters, C., Clough, P., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B. (eds) Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images. CLEF 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3491. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11519645_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11519645_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-27420-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32051-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)