Introduction to the Special Issue on Indian Language Information Retrieval Part I

Abstract

The special issue of Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP) discusses six research papers on Indian language Information Retrieval (IR). The first article, 'The FIRE 2008 Evaluation Exercise' by Prasenjit Majumder and co-workers, provides the motivation and background for the FIRE initiative. It describes how the FIRE 2008 test collection was constructed, and summarizes the approaches adopted by various participants. The authors also discuss the limitations of the datasets, and outline the tasks planned for the next iteration of FIRE. Leveling and Jones in their article,'Sub-word Indexing and Blind Relevance Feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR,' try a corpus-based stemming approach based on morpheme induction, as well as sub-word indexing units. The final article, An Information Extraction System for Urdu - A Resource Poor Language' by Smruthi, addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks for Urdu, a language that is not addressed by any of the other articles.