Overview of the FIRE 2013 Track on Transliterated Search
Rishiraj Saha Roy, Monojit Choudhury, Prasenjit Majumder, Komal Agarwal · 2013
In this paper, we provide an overview of the FIRE 2013 track on transliterated search and describe the datasets released as part of the track. This was the first year that the track was organized. We had proposed two subtasks as part of the challenge. In the first subtask, which we had proposed for Hindi, Bangla, and Gujarati, participants had to devise an algorithm to label the true languages of words in a sentence. Additionally, if a non-English word was identified, the algorithm was also supposed to provide the transliteration of the word in the native script. The second subtask was retrieval-based, where mixed-script documents had to be retrieved and ranked by relevance in response to ad hoc queries. The queries in our dataset were Bollywood Hindi song lyrics, in Roman script. We received a total of 25 run submissions from five different teams across the world (three from India and two from abroad). Conducting this track helped us generate awareness about the importance of transliteration in the context of Indian languages. Results show that there is considerable scope for improvement of transliteration accuracies for the studied languages.