A comprehensive survey on cross-language information retrieval system

Abstract

Cross language information retrieval (CLIR) is a retrieval process in which the user fires queries in one language to retrieve information from another (different) language. The amount of information generated in different languages and disseminated via the World Wide Web and social media platforms is growing exponentially. It is important to ensure that online information resources and services are efficiently and equitably accessible to all users, regardless of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The need for exploring and building more specialized information systems that enable speakers of an Odia language to discover valuable information beyond linguistic and cultural barriers. This study is aimed to build an experimental CLIR system between one of the under-resourced languages (i.e. Odia), and one of the most commonly used online languages, (i.e. English). However, we have not yet considered any prototype approach to develop English-Odia CLIR system. In this research we studied on the various IR variants and techniques used in CLIR system. Further, based on available literature, a number of challenges and issues in CLIR have been identified and discussed. Firstly, we have focused on building basic linguistic resources and IR tools required for designing an English-Odia CLIR using Apache Lucene engine. Secondly, some of the major linguistic resources that we developed during the course of this study include a Unicode compatible Odia Keyboard, normalised Odia corpus, a generic computational model of Odia morphology, a bilingual dictionary and an Odia stemmer from scratch. While our English-Odia dictionary has been adopted and used for query translation.