Bengali and Hindi to English CLIR Evaluation

This paper presents a cross-language retrieval system for the retrieval of English documents in response to queries in Bengali and Hindi, as part of our participation in CLEF1 2007 Ad-hoc bilingual track. We followed the dictionary-based Machine Translation approach to generate the equivalent English query out of Indian language topics. Our main challenge was to work with a limited coverage dictionary (of coverage ∼ 20%) that was available for Hindi-English, and virtually non-existent dictionary for Bengali-English. So we depended mostly on a phonetic transliteration system to overcome this. The CLEF results point to the need for a rich bilingual lexicon, a translation disambiguator, Named Entity Recognizer and a better transliterator for CLIR involving Indian languages. The best MAP values for Bengali and Hindi CLIR for our experiment were 7.26% and 4.77%, which are 20% and 13% of our best monolingual retrieval, respectively.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Debasis Mandal, Mayank Gupta, Sandipan Dandapat, Pratyush Banerjee, Sudeshna Sarkar
• Keywords: Ad-hoc Bilingual Track, CLEF 2007, Cross-language Retrieval, Indian Languages, Information Retrieval