A Lightweight Stemmer for Gujarati

Gujarati is a resource poor language with almost no language processing tools being available. In this paper we have shown an implementation of a rule based stemmer of Gujarati. We have shown the creation of rules for stemming and the richness in morphology that Gujarati possesses. We have also evaluated our results by verifying it with a human expert

Improving the quality of Gujarati-Hindi Machine Translation through part-of-speech tagging and stemmer-assisted transliteration

Machine Translation for Indian languages is an emerging research area. Transliteration is one such module that we design while designing a translation system. Transliteration means mapping of source language text into the target language. Simple mapping decreases the efficiency of overall translation system. We propose the use of stemming and part-of-speech tagging for transliteration. The effectiveness of translation can be improved if we use part-of-speech tagging and stemming assisted transliteration.We have shown that much of the content in Gujarati gets transliterated while being processed for translation to Hindi language

DCU@FIRE2010: term conflation, blind relevance feedback, and cross-language IR with manual and automatic query translation

For the first participation of Dublin City University (DCU) in the FIRE 2010 evaluation campaign, information retrieval (IR) experiments on English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi documents were performed to investigate term conation (different stemming approaches and indexing word prefixes), blind relevance feedback, and manual and automatic query translation. The experiments are based on BM25 and on language modeling (LM) for IR. Results show that term conation always improves mean average precision (MAP) compared to indexing unprocessed word forms, but different approaches seem to work best for different languages. For example, in monolingual Marathi experiments indexing 5-prefixes outperforms our corpus-based stemmer; in Hindi, the corpus-based stemmer achieves a higher MAP. For Bengali, the LM retrieval model achieves a much higher MAP than BM25 (0.4944 vs. 0.4526). In all experiments using BM25, blind relevance feedback yields considerably higher MAP in comparison to experiments without it. Bilingual IR experiments (English!Bengali and English!Hindi) are based on query translations obtained from native speakers and the Google translate web service. For the automatically translated queries, MAP is slightly (but not significantly) lower compared to experiments with manual query translations. The bilingual English!Bengali (English!Hindi) experiments achieve 81.7%-83.3% (78.0%-80.6%) of the best corresponding monolingual experiments

Cross-lingual information retrieval and delivery using community mobile networks

Much of the Web content is in English and accessing this content is difficult for non-English speaking users because of the language barrier. Hence, there is a great need for providing applications and interfaces in one's own language to tap into this vast knowledge reserve. In addition, access to the Internet is still a major problem in developing countries because of the "digital divide" and hand held devices such as PDAs and Mobile Phones are seen as enablers in bridging this gap. However, displaying cross-lingual content on these mobile devices is a non trivial task and there is a great need for robust mechanisms and infrastructure for content delivery in different languages on the fly. This paper presents an overall approach for cross-lingual content specification and delivery for computing/mobile devices. It helps mitigate the language barrier by providing cross-lingual search and retrieval capabilities for accessing the Web content

Sub-word indexing and blind relevance feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR

The Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) provides document collections, topics, and relevance assessments for information retrieval (IR) experiments on Indian languages. Several research questions are explored in this paper: 1. how to create create a simple, languageindependent corpus-based stemmer, 2. how to identify sub-words and which types of sub-words are suitable as indexing units, and 3. how to apply blind relevance feedback on sub-words and how feedback term selection is affected by the type of the indexing unit. More than 140 IR experiments are conducted using the BM25 retrieval model on the topic titles and descriptions (TD) for the FIRE 2008 English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi document collections. The major findings are: The corpus-based stemming approach is effective as a knowledge-light term conation step and useful in case of few language-specific resources. For English, the corpusbased stemmer performs nearly as well as the Porter stemmer and significantly better than the baseline of indexing words when combined with query expansion. In combination with blind relevance feedback, it also performs significantly better than the baseline for Bengali and Marathi IR. Sub-words such as consonant-vowel sequences and word prefixes can yield similar or better performance in comparison to word indexing. There is no best performing method for all languages. For English, indexing using the Porter stemmer performs best, for Bengali and Marathi, overlapping 3-grams obtain the best result, and for Hindi, 4-prefixes yield the highest MAP. However, in combination with blind relevance feedback using 10 documents and 20 terms, 6-prefixes for English and 4-prefixes for Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR yield the highest MAP. Sub-word identification is a general case of decompounding. It results in one or more index terms for a single word form and increases the number of index terms but decreases their average length. The corresponding retrieval experiments show that relevance feedback on sub-words benefits from selecting a larger number of index terms in comparison with retrieval on word forms. Similarly, selecting the number of relevance feedback terms depending on the ratio of word vocabulary size to sub-word vocabulary size almost always slightly increases information retrieval effectiveness compared to using a fixed number of terms for different languages