Tamil english cross lingual information retrieval

Abstract

This paper describes our work on participation in the FIRE 2010 evaluation campaign in the cross lingual information retrieval track. We describe how cross lingual information retrieval can be effectively performed between a highly agglutinative language, Tamil and English, an isolating language. Agglutination is a morphological process of adding affixes to word base. These affixations can be between noun- noun, adjective-noun, noun-case, etc. This phenomenon of the language has brought serious problems in translation, transliteration and expansion of the query into another language. To overcome these we have used a morphological analyzer which gives the root word or a word base. The word base is used in turn for translation, transliteration and query expansion. The translation of the query is done using bilingual dictionary and transliteration uses statistical method. And query expansion is performed using ontology and WordNet.