Hindi and Marathi to English Cross Language Information Retrieval at CLEF 2007.
Manoj Kumar Chinnakotla, Sagar Ranadive, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Om Damani · CLEF (Working Notes) · 2007
In this paper, we present our Hindi→English and Marathi→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 approach which utilizes the corpus to return the ‘k’ closest English transliterations of the given Hindi/Marathi 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 in title which is 61.36% of monolingual performance and a MAP of 0.2952 in title and description which is 67.06% of monolingual performance. For Marathi, we achieve a MAP of 0.2163 in title which is 56.09% of monolingual performance.