Hindi to English and Marathi to English cross language information retrieval evaluation

In this paper, we present our Hindi to English and Marathi to English CLIR systems developed as part of our participation in the CLEF 2007 Ad-Hoc Bilingual task. We take a query translation based approach using bi-lingual dictionaries. Query words not found in the dictionary are transliterated using a simple rule based transliteration approach. The resultant transliteration is then compared with the unique words of the corpus to return the 'k' words most similar to the transliterated word. The resulting multiple translation/transliteration choices for each query word are disambiguated using an iterative page-rank style algorithm which, based on term-term co-occurrence statistics, produces the final translated query. Using the above approach, for Hindi, we achieve a Mean Average Precision (MAP) of 0.2366 using title and a MAP of 0.2952 using title and description. For Marathi, we achieve a MAP of 0.2163 using title