Information Retrieval in African Languages
This is an incremental position paper that overviews existing work but does not introduce new methods or results.
The paper addresses the challenge of developing Information Retrieval tools for African languages, highlighting the lack of algorithms and small test datasets as key obstacles, which hinder practical applications and socio-economic solutions in poor countries.
Developing Information Retrieval (IR) tools and techniques in African languages suffers from the dual problems of a lack of algorithms and very small test data collections. This affects the creation of practical IR systems and limits the ability to apply IR to address human and socio-economic problems, which is an urgent need in poor countries. This position paper presents an overview of recent and current work conducted at the University of Cape Town in this area. While many problems have been investigated at an early stage, limited dataset sizes for local African languages still persists as a significant limitation and stumbling block.