Dictionary-based Amharic-French Information Retrieval

We present four approaches to the Amharic French bilingual track at CLEF 2005. All experiments use a dictionary based approach to translate the Amharic queries into French Bags-of-words, but while one approach uses word sense discrimination on the translated side of the queries, the other one includes all senses of a translated word in the query for searching. We used two search engines: The SICS experimental engine and Lucene, hence four runs with the two approaches. Non-content bearing words were removed both before and after the dictionary lookup. TF/IDF values supplemented by a heuristic function was used to remove the stop words from the Amharic queries and two French stopwords lists were used to remove them from the French translations. In our experiments, we found that the SICS search engine performs better than Lucene and that using the word sense discriminated keywords produce a slightly better result than the full set of non discriminated keywords.