Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages

Since most of the existing major search engines and commercial Information Retrieval (IR) systems are primarily designed for well-resourced European and Asian languages, they have paid little attention to the development of Cross-Language Information Access (CLIA) technologies for resource-scarce African languages. This paper presents the authors' experience in building CLIA for indigenous African languages, with a special focus on the development and evaluation of Oromo-English-CLIR. The authors have adopted a knowledge-based query translation approach to design and implement their initial Oromo-English CLIR (OMEN-CLIR). Apart from designing and building the first OMEN-CLIR from scratch, another major contribution of this study is assessing the performance of the proposed retrieval system at one of the well-recognized international Cross-Language Evaluation Forums like the CLEF campaign. The overall performance of OMEN-CLIR was found to be very promising and encouraging, given the limited amount of linguistic resources available for severely under-resourced African languages like Afaan Oromo.