Related papers: Information Retrieval in African Languages
Public service information systems are often fragmented, inconsistently formatted, and outdated. These characteristics create low-resource retrieval environments that hinder timely access to critical services. We investigate retrieval…
This paper reports some difficulties and some results when using dense retrievers on Amharic, one of the low-resource languages spoken by 120 millions populations. The efforts put and difficulties faced by University Addis Ababa toward…
The research field of Information Retrieval (IR) has evolved significantly, expanding beyond traditional search to meet diverse user information needs. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in…
Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. Motivated by the emergent reasoning abilities…
Stopwords are fundamental in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for information retrieval. One of the common tasks in preprocessing of text data is the removal of stopwords. Currently, while high-resource languages like English…
African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems --…
Locating and distilling the valuable relevant information continued to be the major challenges of Information Retrieval (IR) Systems owing to the explosive growth of online web information. These challenges can be considered the XML…
In this paper we describe the requirements for research information systems and problems which arise in the development of such system. Here is shown which problems could be solved by using of knowledge markup technologies. Ontology for…
Africa's rich linguistic heritage remains underrepresented in NLP, largely due to historical policies that favor foreign languages and create significant data inequities. In this paper, we integrate theoretical insights on Africa's language…
Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) addresses the challenge of retrieving relevant documents written in languages different from that of the original query. Research in this area has typically framed the task as monolingual retrieval…
As language and speech technologies become more advanced, the lack of fundamental digital resources for African languages, such as data, spell checkers and Part of Speech taggers, means that the digital divide between these languages and…
Information retrieval (IR) plays a crucial role in locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data, and its applications have evolved from traditional knowledge bases to modern retrieval models (RMs). The emergence of large language…
Information retrieval (IR) is a user approach to obtain relevant information which meets needs with the help of a IR system (IRS). However, the IRS shows certain differences between user relevance and system relevance. These gaps are…
A conversational information retrieval (CIR) system is an information retrieval (IR) system with a conversational interface which allows users to interact with the system to seek information via multi-turn conversations of natural language,…
Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…
Researchers working on low-resource languages face persistent challenges due to limited data availability and restricted access to computational resources. Although most large language models (LLMs) are predominantly trained in…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is becoming a dominant subset of artificial intelligence as the need to help machines understand human language looks indispensable. Several NLP applications are ubiquitous, partly due to the myriad of…
Automated detection of semantically equivalent questions in longitudinal social science surveys is crucial for long-term studies informing empirical research in the social, economic, and health sciences. Retrieving equivalent questions…
Despite recent advancements in Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR), a significant gap remains between research and practical deployment. Many studies assess MLIR performance in isolated settings, limiting their applicability to…
Language models are increasingly becoming popular in AI-powered scientific IR systems. This paper evaluates popular scientific language models in handling (i) short-query texts and (ii) textual neighbors. Our experiments showcase the…