Application of the Double Metaphone Algorithm to Amharic Orthography

The Metaphone algorithm applies the phonetic encoding of orthographic sequences to simplify words prior to comparison. While Metaphone has been highly successful for the English language, for which it was designed, it may not be applied directly to Ethiopian languages. The paper details how the principles of Metaphone can be applied to Ethiopic script and uses Amharic as a case study. Match results improve as specific considerations are made for Amharic writing practices. Results are shown to improve further when common errors from Amharic input methods are considered. International Conference of Ethiopian Studies XV, 13 pages