Sinhala to English Cross Language Information Retrieval

Abstract

When considering the ubiquitous availability of and the thirst for information of people, language barriers are considered as unacceptable for accessing information. Cross Language Information Retrieval mechanisms are widely researched as one way to overcome possible barriers with various initiatives carried out with varying degree of success. When considering this solution, there is very little literature on Sinhala to English Cross Language Information Retrieval. The thirst for information of the people, whose mother-tongue is Sinhalese, is also high. Therefore, it is worth researching on how to overcome language barriers for Sinhala to English as well. Information Retrieval refers to accessing information in a situation where both the query and the retrieved documents are in the same language. The idea behind Cross Language Information Retrieval is to retrieve documents in a language different from a query language which usually is the user‟s own language. This is advantageous even when the user is not a speaker of the language used in the retrieved documents. The scope of this project is to develop a tool where a user can provide a request in Sinhala and receive a response in English. The tool will play the role between the user and the search engine. The methodology used in the solution described in this thesis, can be summarized as; the user enters a search query in Sinhala; this Sinhala query is translated in to an appropriate English query; the English query is then directed to a search engine; the resulting hits provided by the search engine is then presented to the user through the application and the user can access links of the results by means of the default web browser. At the end of the research and the experiments done, many important factors were revealed such as; when considering manipulating the language Sinhala, it has many outliers and exceptions; many limitations were identified and solutions were also figured out up to some extent; from this initial step, number of future paths were exposed for further improvements as well as for further inventions with regard to this context.