Amharic-English Information Retrieval with Pseudo Relevance Feedback

We describe cross language retrieval experiments using Amharic queries and English language document collection from our participation in the bilingual ad hoc track at the CLEF 2007. Two monolingual and eight bilingual runs were submitted. The bilingual experiments designed varied in terms of usage of long and short queries, presence of pseudo relevance feedback (PRF), and three approaches (maximal expansion, first-translation-given, manual) for word sense disambiguation. We used an AmharicEnglish machine readable dictionary (MRD) and an online Amharic-English dictionary in order to do the lookup translation of query terms. In utilizing both resources, matching query term bigrams were always given precedence over unigrams. Out of dictionary Amharic query terms were taken to be possible named entities in the language, and further filtering was attained through restricted fuzzy matching based on edit distance. The fuzzy matching was performed for each of these terms against automatica...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Atelach Alemu Argaw
• Keywords: Amharic Query Terms, CLEF 2007, Fuzzy Matching, Information Retrieval, Query Terms