Regular Sound Changes for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

The aim of this project is the automatic conversion of query terms in one language into their equivalents in a second, historically related, language, so that documents in the second language can be retrieved. The method is to compile lists of regular sound changes which occur between related words of a language pair, and substitute these in the source language words to generate target language words. For example, if we know b in Italian often corresponds with a v in Spanish, an unaccented o in Italian with ó in Spanish, and a terminal e in Italian is replaced with a null in Spanish, we can construct the Spanish word autómovil (car) from the Italian automobile. A bilingual word list or dictionary is needed at first to first discover the set of regular sound changes, but once this is known, there is no further need for a dictionary to look up individual query words. The method is language pair independent, as long as the two languages belong to the same language family, such as the R...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Michael P. Oakes, Souvik Banerjee
• Keywords: CLEF 2003, Language Pair, Language Words, Regular Sound Changes