Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages: A Case Study on Oromo—English CLIR

Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages: A Case Study on Oromo—English CLIR

Kula Kekeba Tune, Vasudeva Varma
Copyright: © 2015 |Volume: 5 |Issue: 1 |Pages: 20
ISSN: 2155-6377|EISSN: 2155-6385|EISBN13: 9781466679214|DOI: 10.4018/IJIRR.2015010104
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MLA

Tune, Kula Kekeba, and Vasudeva Varma. "Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages: A Case Study on Oromo—English CLIR." IJIRR vol.5, no.1 2015: pp.48-67. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJIRR.2015010104

APA

Tune, K. K. & Varma, V. (2015). Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages: A Case Study on Oromo—English CLIR. International Journal of Information Retrieval Research (IJIRR), 5(1), 48-67. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJIRR.2015010104

Chicago

Tune, Kula Kekeba, and Vasudeva Varma. "Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages: A Case Study on Oromo—English CLIR," International Journal of Information Retrieval Research (IJIRR) 5, no.1: 48-67. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJIRR.2015010104

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Abstract

Since most of the existing major search engines and commercial Information Retrieval (IR) systems are primarily designed for well-resourced European and Asian languages, they have paid little attention to the development of Cross-Language Information Access (CLIA) technologies for resource-scarce African languages. This paper presents the authors' experience in building CLIA for indigenous African languages, with a special focus on the development and evaluation of Oromo-English-CLIR. The authors have adopted a knowledge-based query translation approach to design and implement their initial Oromo-English CLIR (OMEN-CLIR). Apart from designing and building the first OMEN-CLIR from scratch, another major contribution of this study is assessing the performance of the proposed retrieval system at one of the well-recognized international Cross-Language Evaluation Forums like the CLEF campaign. The overall performance of OMEN-CLIR was found to be very promising and encouraging, given the limited amount of linguistic resources available for severely under-resourced African languages like Afaan Oromo.

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